the critical essay of the lottery(1)

THE CRITICAL ESSAY OF THE LOTTERY 姓名:胡霞 学号:3208010660 班级:08英语经贸4班 The short story lottery is the classic work of famous American novelist Shirly Jackson.It narrators the story about the people of a small town held an annual activity of lottery , and the person who got the lottery would be Hit to death by stones for the sake of harvest of the following year. The narrator centers on the actions and simple language of each town people from an objective perspective to reflect the blind obedience, less of rationality and cruel coldness of human nature of the whole town people. The essay will focus on the analysis of the characters to dig up the deep themes of the short story. The difference between the lottery and other stories is that there is no clear clue to define who are the leading roles and who are the supporting roles. In other words , the whole town people is the a complete protagonist. In the story, the narrator shows us the whole process the lottery activity just like a professional reporter, she described each plot with calm attitude and we could not see any personal feeling or expectation of the writer from any character of the whole town people. In the small town , the activity of lottery was presented by a man who was Named Mr. summers, who had time and energy to devote to the civic activities. He was a round-faced,jovial man and he ran the coal business,and people were sorry for him,because he had no children and his wife was a scold. The name summers has implied us the social status and influences of Mr. Summers, he was the owner of the coal business and had power on the whole town people. Every living summer, he gathered the people together and held the lottery ceremony which cost one human being life to keep the stupid suspicious saying: lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. The group of people like Mr. Summers had controls not only on the whole process of the lottery but also the economic resources even destinies. The lottery was only a kind of ritual which was used to blind their souls, transfer their dissatisfy about the real life and take out their anger on the more miserable person-the lottery winner. The old man Mr. Warner was the eldest person in the town who was supposed to the wisdom in common sense, instead he was the representative of the most fatuous and cruel human beings. He has been in the lottery for 77 years quoted what he said: "seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery" as he went through the crowd :seventy seven times. We can understand from a different view: he has been taking part in killing people to death for more than seventy times. The luckiness of he could escape from each Life-risk in the lottery has been transformed into huge zealous passion to keep this convention and defend anyone who even thought about abandoning this ritual in head. The lottery tradition has been kept year by year, there was a human being was hit to death year by year, until this year when the narrator reported to us , we still could not see a sign that it would be changed. So the lottery winner Tessie in this year was just like everyone in the past, she was the victim for others to keep their blind ritual. We don't know why the writer chose Tessie to be the victim. There was no any signal which implies Tessie would be the one who got the lottery. She was like everyone who came for this ceremony as a participant and a vindicator as well.