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The village lottery culminates in a violent murder each year, a bizarre ritual that suggests how dangerous tradition can be when people follow it blindly. Before we know what kind of lottery theyre conducting, the villagers and their preparations seem harmless, even quaint: theyve appointed a rather pathetic man to lead the lottery, and children run about gathering stones in the town square. Everyone is seems preoccupied with a funny-looking black box, and the lottery consists of little more than handmade slips of paper. Tradition is endemic to small towns, a way to link families and generations. Jackson, however, pokes holes in the reverence that people have for tradition. She writes that the villagers dont really know much about the lotterys origin but try to preserve the tradition nevertheless.
The villagers blind acceptance of the lottery has allowed ritual murder to become part of their town fabric. As they have demonstrated, they feel powerless to changeor even try to changeanything, although there is no one forcing them to keep things the same. Old Man Warner is so faithful to the tradition that he fears the villagers will return to primitive times if they stop holding the lottery. These ordinary people, who have just come from work or from their homes and will soon return home for lunch, easily kill someone when they are told to. And they dont have a reason for doing it other than the fact that theyve always held a lottery to kill someone. If the villagers stopped to question it, they would be forced to ask themselves why they are committing a murderbut no one stops to question. For them, the fact that this is tradition is reason enough and gives them all the justification they need.
Villagers persecute individuals at random, and the victim is guilty of no transgression other than having drawn the wrong slip of paper from a box. The elaborate ritual of the lottery is designed so that all villagers have the same chance of becoming the victimeven children are at risk. Each year, someone new is chosen and killed, and no family is safe. What makes The Lottery so chilling is the swiftness with which the villagers turn against the victim. The instant that Tessie Hutchinson chooses the marked slip of paper, she loses her identity as a popular housewife. Her friends and family participate in the killing with as much enthusiasm as everyone else. Tessie essentially becomes invisible to them in the fervor of persecution. Although she has done nothing wrong, her innocence doesnt matter. She has drawn the marked papershe has herself become markedand according to the logic of the lottery, she therefore must die.
Tessies death is an extreme example of how societies can persecute innocent people for absurd reasons. Present-day parallels are easy to draw, because all prejudices, whether they are based on race, sex, appearance, religion, economic class, geographical region, family background, or sexual orientation, are essentially random. Those who are persecuted become marked because of a trait or characteristic that is out of their controlfor example, they are the wrong sex or from the wrong part of the country. Just as the villagers in The Lottery blindly follow tradition and kill Tessie because that is what they are expected to do, people in real life often persecute others without questioning why. As Jackson suggests, any such persecution is essentially random, which is why Tessies bizarre death is so universal.
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