The Lottery

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.


Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"

NOTE: If you haven't read "The Lottery," it is brief and bone-chilling, and if you desire its ending to be a surprise I recommend reading it before you continue.  I wish there were a way to tell about this class without revealing the ending, but alas, there is not.

No one speaks for a while after I finish reading.  The last words of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," breathtaking and weighty, hangs in the air like smoke from a snuffed candle.  I wonder for a moment, in the silence, whether my students are also imagining Tessie Hutchinson's toddler son picking up pebbles with which to stone his mother.

"OK," someone finally blurts out, "What just happened?"

"They stoned her," a classmate replies.  "That's what the lottery was for.  They stone one person every year."

A shiver runs through the room.

"Oh, that's messed up."

It is messed up.  This story, an American classic, tells of a village that holds an annual lottery to stone one of its residents.  The townspeople are friendly and casual, with a familiar attachment to the traditions that make life predictable.  They approach this particular tradition with a cheerful resignation, awaiting the results and then participating in the stoning, relieved to have escaped for another year.

I've read it for various reasons each year, and continue to understand it more each time.  This year, I am reading it with my students at the close of our Lord of the Flies unit.  With Golding's novel, it is easy to see how the breakdown of civilization parallels the breakdown of morality.  The initial organization the boys created on their island wasn't perfect, but it was in the descent to savagery that they abandoned both the rules of their initial "government" and the moral boundaries it implied.  "The Lottery," by contrast, shows a society that is both extremely civilized and ritualistically evil.

After responding for a few minutes in writing, we begin to talk in greater depth about the story.

"So, what do you think, is this civilization inherently good?" I ask, returning to the journal question with which we started today's class.

No, the students reply in chorus.  We talk for a while about the nature of this civilization, comparing it to immoral dictatorships or traditions all over the world and throughout history.  I had also asked them to speculate on why they might have had this tradition in the first place.

"For entertainment."  The answer is chilling, though I suspect its truth.  I press further.

"Do we see any evidence that this happens in the real world?  Violence for entertainment?"

"Gladiators!"

"Professional wrestling!"

"What about fights?" I ask.  "What happens when you hear there's a fight happening?"

I know the answer already, though I listen for several minutes as they chatter about the herds of people gathering like ants around the writhing, red-faced combatants, holding cell phones and video iPods to capture the details to post on Youtube later.  It's a dark reality of our lives here, particularly in the hall outside my classroom, a distant corner of the school near the edge of campus.  It bothers me how my students, who hope for peace and equality and justice in the world, can at the same time be so enthralled by the violence that happens right in front of them.

It's not the same, I know, high schoolers watching a fight and villagers engaging in the meaningless execution of one of their own.  Both Lord of the Flies and "The Lottery" give dire warnings, terrifying worst-case-scenarios of the consequences of abandoning the restraint of morality.  I can only hope that they've begun to consider it, the savagery lurking beneath the surface of society, and that someday they will be ending conflicts instead of photographing them.