“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human
stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.” (Einstein). This is best portrayed
in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”
the author portrays the rigorous cultural traditions that make way to an ignorant
and unjust society. The story starts with the sentence “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the
fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and
the grass was richly green.” Giving the reader a false pretense of what the
end of the future will be. Even the title of the story is riddled with irony
because in our modern society a lottery is viewed as a chance to win something
that would change your life in a positive way.
Jackson also implies that this town on which
these people live in are not very bright when she says “Dickie Delacroix-- the
villagers pronounced this name "Dellacroy” this is known because in the
French language the last name Delacroix is pronounced “Delacrua”, giving the
reader the idea that the people who live in that town chained by the cultural
traditions are not bright enough to understand that their tradition of wishing
for new crops is a pagan, and ignorant one. When the author tells us “The original
paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago”, it describes just how
old and without general basis this tradition is, and this is generally
emphasizes when Jackson says “had been put into use even before Old Man Warner,
the oldest man in town, was born.” Another allegory which describes the way
generations mindlessly follow a tradition is when Jackson says “having slips of
paper substituted for the chips of wood
that had
been used for generations.” Where the author gives the reader an idea of
just how long this ritual has been going long, and the reader can imply that it
had been in use even before the invention of the printing press (which was in
the fifth teen century).
There is also the fact of how Jackson portrayed the emotional imbalance of the people; of how the dearest of friends can become the worst enemies in a matter of seconds. This is given to the reader of how at the beginning Mrs. Delacroix was kind and warm to Mrs. Hutchinson, yet at the end, when her family picked up the slip of paper with a black dot on it and Mrs. Hutchinson was screaming of how unfair it was, Mrs. Delacroix shouts “Be a good sport Tessie” knowing very clearly of the fate that awaited one of the members of the family. This imbalance is what keeps people from making a connection in our modern world and it is the main responsible for the atrocities that give way into violence and ignorance.
There is no place for violence in this
world, and there shouldn’t be a place for blindly following traditions without
asking us “Is it worth it?” “Does it follow our own moral code?” The creed of
the Buddhist states “Do not believe in anything simply because tradition says so,
even though many generations of people born in many places have believed in it for many centuries.” People should live by the way they truly feel in
their hearts, and that it goes accordingly to the morals each and everyone of
us has. When we change the society in which we live in, then we can truly
change the way man lives on this earth.
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