The Not-So-Beneficial-Lottery

So...I thought The Cask of Amontillado was messed up...WHAT THE HELL SHIRLEY JACKSON?!

I've read this story before, but after reading it a second time the "messed up-ness" hit me even more. It's just so crazy that people would have a lottery to kill someone.

The first time I read it, I expected the lottery to be a good thing the entire time. I didnt pick up on any of the subtle hints that I did the second time through, such as the rocks the children were piling up or the slight nervousness here and there among the villagers. So, I naturally was completely surprised when they started stoning the lady. I guess that's part of what makes it such an interesting story, because Shirley Jackson uses the completely different notion of a lottery that we have today against us, so that we dont expect the ending at all, even though she did have some foreshadowing here and there throughout the story.

So I was reading through the questions in the back and one of them really struck me as interesting. Tessie, when she is getting stoned by the villagers, says "It isn't fair!" or something along those lines. But she wasn't talking about it being unfair that she was being KILLED, she was still complaining about her husband not getting enough time to choose the right paper. Yea, valid complaint LADY. If it was me, I definitely would have been mad that I was being stoned to death, not sure about everyone else though. It's weird that they have this lottery and the stoning so ingrained in their society that they really dont question it much. They do a little bit while they are drawing paper when they talk about other towns quitting it, but when it comes time to do the stoning nobody really cares about poor ol' Tessie.

I guess the lottery was originally started for the "legitimate" (the quotations marks around the word legitimate are meant to denote doubt and a hint of sarcasm, due to the fact that I still dont think this reason makes it legitimate) reason of keeping population down when they didnt have enough food to feed the whole village. Now, however, they just keep it around for tradition. (To find out what I think about this, please see the first sentence of this post.)

Anyway, The Lottery is a well written story that keeps you pretty oblivious as to what happens to the "winner" of the lottery, but other than that it kind of just depresses me.