I did my best to not come to the story with anyone else's interpretations in my ear, but I couldn't avoid them all. So I began reading it with some expectation of surprise, outrage, controversy, etc. But a big clue was early in the description of the young boys collecting and sharing rocks – which I read as literal plot point, not a metaphorical foreshadowing. In terms of which of the 22 ways resonated with my reading, in their published order:
- the dangers of rigid rules and blind conformity (big Thoreau and Emerson fan here)
- after some deliberation, I'll hestitantly go with reaction to living under the shadow of the Bomb (which, if I were committed to this interpretation, I'd have to re-cast my rocks-not-foreshadowing stance)
- biting satire of small-town life (I attended four years of high school in a town of less than 2,000)
For me, the Bomb interpretation is confounded by the underlying chance vs. predetermination aspects. The fear of the Bomb (as one who lived with the threat and defended against the threat in the Air Force) was of two parts - fears of a mistake (or action precipitated by a mistake, miscalcuation, disinformation, etc.) and fears of a believing "decider" who thinks he he and his interests will survive.
In the story, the lottery obviously presents chance. But a man (specifically only a married man, as I read it although this may be arguable) has to overtly act in an IF-THEN logic ... if his wife's paper is drawn, then she will receive the penalty. The husband controls the outcome IF the wife's paper is drawn; the wife controls nothing.
(I'm presumptuously going to say "we" here, recognizing that I could be wrong in my understanding.) We don't know the origin of the lottery. We don't know what the townspeople believe about the process and the outcome of the lottery. We know they've changed the box that hold the ballots, but the process and outcome haven't changed. We don't know if the wife is stoned to death. We don't know if the wife is the only woman to be punished. We don't know what would've happened if Mr. Hutchinson had taken more time to draw, as his unlucky wife Tessie claimed repeatedly. And because Tessie, even as she was getting struck by stones, declared "it's not fair, it isn't right" ... was she commenting on the lottery process itself in that her husband had taken (or been given) adequate time?
It's almost as though the author was motivated to force the reader to live with as much ambiguity, uncertainty and unresolved questions as possible.
Thanks for such a thoughtful response to @Susan Lowell’s list. I especially appreciate your comments on why the Bomb view might make sense.
Do members of Gen Z have any idea how people feared and talked about the Bomb back then? “The Lottery” appeared just a few years after Hiroshima. And it makes sense to me that the Bomb might have been on Jackson’s mind when she wrote it. You may hav helped to educate a lot of people on that issue.
That’s one of those times when all I intended to do was say which of the 22 views I related to. Hadn’t thought that deep about the bomb and in fact didn’t select it at first. I can’t remember which documentary covered this, but 5-8 years ago I saw this documentary on the 50s and the cold war. Early on they would use the Tonopah test range outside of Las Vegas (associated with Nellis AFB, pretty sure) for testing different H warheads. There were companies that ran tourist events, provided the dark glass, all kinds of merch that used “atomic” and “nuclear” and other buzzwords. But other than that, my recollection is that it wasn’t anything to joke that much about. And all the jokes about “duck and cover” overlook the practical advice that realistically, going out to the hallway, sitting against the wall and covering your head is about all you could do. In Texas those drilled doubled as tornado drills - a much more likely application of the procedure.
BTW: I just read a quote from Ron Chernow, whose "Mark Twain" comes out next week, talking about "Jim" in a complimentary way. He said that the author was merely correcting some of the minstrel-like ways Twain had Jim act and that he was very respectful of Twain and said, instead of banning Huck, "read it." Or something like that. I have the book, but loved Mark Twain and taught Huck at an African-American school with great success -- even wrote a book about it. So I don't know about "Jim" and that was why I so enjoyed your article, plus you were brave enough to take a stand. Few would in these times..
Thanks, John. Chernow is an interesting case. I didn't read his Hamilton bio in part because some critics I trust thought it was overrated and getting perhaps too much reflected glory from the musical.
But I, too, love Twain and will be interested in the reviews of Chernow's book about him. Twain's bones and those of his work have been so picked over by scholars, I wonder: What can he find to say that's new and worthy?
I like it best of all of Jackson's work that I have read. It's been a while but I remember her describing a search for something in her house, or an explanation for how something had happened, that's considered peerless in its capturing the sheer madness of domestic life with young children.
"Great writing can entertain, enlighten and even empower, but one of its greatest gifts to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka once wrote. Stories like “The Lottery” create waves in that frozen sea. We stifle and censor them at our peril."
Your piece is the best short intro to “The Lottery” I’ve read, Ruth. I recommend it to all, especially to anyone who’d like a quick overview of what the fuss was all about without reading thousands of words.
Susan told me how much she enjoyed your book while we were working on this. Thank you for writing it!
I seem to vaguely remember a sense of thinking, "People shouldn't just do what they are told to do." But I haven't read it since I was very young. I don't recall the details of the story, so I guess I need to re-read. Thanks for the link to it.
You might find a few parallels with what’s happening in politics that you could cleverly work into your stories. Seriously, there seems to be no reason why some people get attacked, rounded up, or otherwise persecuted today—you could see it as “The Lottery” redux.
That would be a neat allegorical treatment, for sure. I can imagine a few different avenues for that. I did a fiction piece on political roundups by a Trump administration way back in 2015 or so, and updated it some before the most recent election. But it doesn't borrow anything from "The Lottery." It was meant more as a scare tactic. It received about 5 views lol. My model for it was actually "The Day After," a nuclear holocaust movie from the 1980s.
Isn't it interesting that this shocked us so much when there were plenty of scarier horror movies then? I can still remember students talking about it in the cafeteria, the first story for which I think that had ever happened.
We read it in grade school! I was already such a misanthrope by then that it struck me as, "Yes, this does seem like something some people would do."
Nothing has happened to raise my opinion of the bottom third of humanity since then. We will do the most amazingly horrible things as long as everyone else seems to be OK with it.
"We Have Always Lived in the Castle" is even better.
Our 7th grade class read "The Lottery." This was in the late 1990s before 1) our reading minds were sophisticated enough to make political connections, and 2) before current events could more easily evoke "The Lottery." The only other class reading that brought the same amount of shock reaction is when we read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce in 10th grade.
Interesting about “Owl Creek.” I didn’t read that one until I was an adult, but—perhaps because I’d read so much more by then—it had nothing like the impact of “The Lottery.”
It almost seems more credible now than it did then, given some of the horrors that we've seen unfolding in the news lately. Thanks for the recommendation on "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." I've never read it but know I need to.
I love “Life Among the Savages,” especially “Charles,” which I believe is in that book. So different from “The Lottery”! But it’s amusing and highly accomplished in its own way.
I've always found it chilling. I'm not sold on the feminist parable angle; the women were just as much participants as the men and the lot could have fallen to any of them. I hadn't thought much about the references to Hitler or the atomic bomb, but I can see that, given the time of publication. Gothic fiction? Absolutely. Dark humor? Maybe in the mold of "Black Mirror" or "Don't Look Up."
If I were still teaching, I would keep it in the canon because it hits so many themes, most of them surrounding an unwillingness to ask "why do we still do X?"
Glad you'd still keep it, Stephanie. Students seem so much more sensitive now, it might be seen as too upsetting for them. You might have to preface it with a trigger warning.
But it's so worth reading, I'd hate to see schools drop it for that reason. What grade did you teach? I've seen "The Lottery" in college anthologies. So maybe the thinking is that you have to save it for older students who can handle the "mature content"?
"A metaphor for lynching" does not sound like a far-fetched interpretation...
I did my best to not come to the story with anyone else's interpretations in my ear, but I couldn't avoid them all. So I began reading it with some expectation of surprise, outrage, controversy, etc. But a big clue was early in the description of the young boys collecting and sharing rocks – which I read as literal plot point, not a metaphorical foreshadowing. In terms of which of the 22 ways resonated with my reading, in their published order:
- the dangers of rigid rules and blind conformity (big Thoreau and Emerson fan here)
- after some deliberation, I'll hestitantly go with reaction to living under the shadow of the Bomb (which, if I were committed to this interpretation, I'd have to re-cast my rocks-not-foreshadowing stance)
- biting satire of small-town life (I attended four years of high school in a town of less than 2,000)
For me, the Bomb interpretation is confounded by the underlying chance vs. predetermination aspects. The fear of the Bomb (as one who lived with the threat and defended against the threat in the Air Force) was of two parts - fears of a mistake (or action precipitated by a mistake, miscalcuation, disinformation, etc.) and fears of a believing "decider" who thinks he he and his interests will survive.
In the story, the lottery obviously presents chance. But a man (specifically only a married man, as I read it although this may be arguable) has to overtly act in an IF-THEN logic ... if his wife's paper is drawn, then she will receive the penalty. The husband controls the outcome IF the wife's paper is drawn; the wife controls nothing.
(I'm presumptuously going to say "we" here, recognizing that I could be wrong in my understanding.) We don't know the origin of the lottery. We don't know what the townspeople believe about the process and the outcome of the lottery. We know they've changed the box that hold the ballots, but the process and outcome haven't changed. We don't know if the wife is stoned to death. We don't know if the wife is the only woman to be punished. We don't know what would've happened if Mr. Hutchinson had taken more time to draw, as his unlucky wife Tessie claimed repeatedly. And because Tessie, even as she was getting struck by stones, declared "it's not fair, it isn't right" ... was she commenting on the lottery process itself in that her husband had taken (or been given) adequate time?
It's almost as though the author was motivated to force the reader to live with as much ambiguity, uncertainty and unresolved questions as possible.
Thanks for such a thoughtful response to @Susan Lowell’s list. I especially appreciate your comments on why the Bomb view might make sense.
Do members of Gen Z have any idea how people feared and talked about the Bomb back then? “The Lottery” appeared just a few years after Hiroshima. And it makes sense to me that the Bomb might have been on Jackson’s mind when she wrote it. You may hav helped to educate a lot of people on that issue.
That’s one of those times when all I intended to do was say which of the 22 views I related to. Hadn’t thought that deep about the bomb and in fact didn’t select it at first. I can’t remember which documentary covered this, but 5-8 years ago I saw this documentary on the 50s and the cold war. Early on they would use the Tonopah test range outside of Las Vegas (associated with Nellis AFB, pretty sure) for testing different H warheads. There were companies that ran tourist events, provided the dark glass, all kinds of merch that used “atomic” and “nuclear” and other buzzwords. But other than that, my recollection is that it wasn’t anything to joke that much about. And all the jokes about “duck and cover” overlook the practical advice that realistically, going out to the hallway, sitting against the wall and covering your head is about all you could do. In Texas those drilled doubled as tornado drills - a much more likely application of the procedure.
Jan: Reading your fine story made me remember something I did when teaching it. Thanks I referred to your story, too.. https://johnnogowski.substack.com/p/teaching-shirley-jacksons-the-lottery
Now THAT is cool!!! Thanks so much.
BTW: I just read a quote from Ron Chernow, whose "Mark Twain" comes out next week, talking about "Jim" in a complimentary way. He said that the author was merely correcting some of the minstrel-like ways Twain had Jim act and that he was very respectful of Twain and said, instead of banning Huck, "read it." Or something like that. I have the book, but loved Mark Twain and taught Huck at an African-American school with great success -- even wrote a book about it. So I don't know about "Jim" and that was why I so enjoyed your article, plus you were brave enough to take a stand. Few would in these times..
Thanks, John. Chernow is an interesting case. I didn't read his Hamilton bio in part because some critics I trust thought it was overrated and getting perhaps too much reflected glory from the musical.
But I, too, love Twain and will be interested in the reviews of Chernow's book about him. Twain's bones and those of his work have been so picked over by scholars, I wonder: What can he find to say that's new and worthy?
I like it best of all of Jackson's work that I have read. It's been a while but I remember her describing a search for something in her house, or an explanation for how something had happened, that's considered peerless in its capturing the sheer madness of domestic life with young children.
Thanks for the nice shout-out to my book!
I also wrote this little piece about it for the NYT a couple of years ago: "75 Years Ago, ‘The Lottery’ Went Viral. There’s a Reason We’re Still Talking About It." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/opinion/the-lottery-fiction.html
"Great writing can entertain, enlighten and even empower, but one of its greatest gifts to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka once wrote. Stories like “The Lottery” create waves in that frozen sea. We stifle and censor them at our peril."
I really admire your Jackson biography, a stellar example of the genre, beautifully researched and presented. And I will look for your new book!
Your piece is the best short intro to “The Lottery” I’ve read, Ruth. I recommend it to all, especially to anyone who’d like a quick overview of what the fuss was all about without reading thousands of words.
Susan told me how much she enjoyed your book while we were working on this. Thank you for writing it!
I seem to vaguely remember a sense of thinking, "People shouldn't just do what they are told to do." But I haven't read it since I was very young. I don't recall the details of the story, so I guess I need to re-read. Thanks for the link to it.
You might find a few parallels with what’s happening in politics that you could cleverly work into your stories. Seriously, there seems to be no reason why some people get attacked, rounded up, or otherwise persecuted today—you could see it as “The Lottery” redux.
That would be a neat allegorical treatment, for sure. I can imagine a few different avenues for that. I did a fiction piece on political roundups by a Trump administration way back in 2015 or so, and updated it some before the most recent election. But it doesn't borrow anything from "The Lottery." It was meant more as a scare tactic. It received about 5 views lol. My model for it was actually "The Day After," a nuclear holocaust movie from the 1980s.
It's here on Substack:
https://www.ruminato.com/p/the-neighbors-beyond-the-yard
My English class was assigned this in the 8th grade as well. I can still remember the shock.
Isn't it interesting that this shocked us so much when there were plenty of scarier horror movies then? I can still remember students talking about it in the cafeteria, the first story for which I think that had ever happened.
We read it in grade school! I was already such a misanthrope by then that it struck me as, "Yes, this does seem like something some people would do."
Nothing has happened to raise my opinion of the bottom third of humanity since then. We will do the most amazingly horrible things as long as everyone else seems to be OK with it.
"We Have Always Lived in the Castle" is even better.
Our 7th grade class read "The Lottery." This was in the late 1990s before 1) our reading minds were sophisticated enough to make political connections, and 2) before current events could more easily evoke "The Lottery." The only other class reading that brought the same amount of shock reaction is when we read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce in 10th grade.
Interesting about “Owl Creek.” I didn’t read that one until I was an adult, but—perhaps because I’d read so much more by then—it had nothing like the impact of “The Lottery.”
It almost seems more credible now than it did then, given some of the horrors that we've seen unfolding in the news lately. Thanks for the recommendation on "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." I've never read it but know I need to.
OH MY GOD! I so envy you that you get to read it for the first time. You will want to write about it.
I love, love, love that book. Also “The Haunting of Hill House” but that goes without saying.
I also recommend Jackson's Life Among the Savages, her account of raising her children.
I love “Life Among the Savages,” especially “Charles,” which I believe is in that book. So different from “The Lottery”! But it’s amusing and highly accomplished in its own way.
I need to get to that one.
I've always found it chilling. I'm not sold on the feminist parable angle; the women were just as much participants as the men and the lot could have fallen to any of them. I hadn't thought much about the references to Hitler or the atomic bomb, but I can see that, given the time of publication. Gothic fiction? Absolutely. Dark humor? Maybe in the mold of "Black Mirror" or "Don't Look Up."
If I were still teaching, I would keep it in the canon because it hits so many themes, most of them surrounding an unwillingness to ask "why do we still do X?"
Glad you'd still keep it, Stephanie. Students seem so much more sensitive now, it might be seen as too upsetting for them. You might have to preface it with a trigger warning.
But it's so worth reading, I'd hate to see schools drop it for that reason. What grade did you teach? I've seen "The Lottery" in college anthologies. So maybe the thinking is that you have to save it for older students who can handle the "mature content"?
Reading short stories that would appear in The New Yorker is still a part of public school curriculums?
Apparently so. But I’ve seen it in college anthologies that came out later, so perhaps it’s being assigned to later ages now.