I just read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson...?

Question

I don't understand why the towns people would want to stone a random person to death. I didn't like the story. What was the main point and why did they want to kill someone?

I thought it was weird. Anyways okay I get it now, they thought if they stoned her that their town would become more prosperous. Got it.

Answer 1

I hated the story too... I had to read it in high school.

If I remember correctly, the people believed that it was necessary to stone someone in order to have a good crop the following year. It also shows how Tessie was joking around and it was all fun and games until she was selected and it became personal, and only then "it wasn't fair"

That's all I remember...

Answer 2

It's a really creepy and haunting story. I read it a long time ago, and it still gives me the goose bumps.

The Lottery was a tradition in the town - they had always done it that way for as long as anyone could remember, although no one was exactly sure WHY. However, everyone pretty much agreed that it would be bad luck not to continue with the tradition (unless they were chosen...).

There are a lot of myths, legends, stories about sacrificing an innocent to ward off evil for the rest of the community. Think of the sacrifice in King Kong, Joe and the Volcano, or the Minotaur.

The point is that people get used to thinking about things in one way, and used to doing things in a particular way. Once the 'tradition' has started, it can be very hard to persuade them differently - even if you can point out horrible consequences or inconsistencies resulting from their beliefs.

In fact, people who try to discuss or question these traditions are often labeled 'heretics' or 'dissidents" or 'traitors', and may be persecuted, exiled, imprisoned or killed. (Kind of ironic - following tradition may get you killed, and challenging tradition may get you killed...)

The point of the story was to make people think about what kinds of traditions we have in our everyday lives, that limit our actions and have consequences that we might not choose for ourselves.

Some of the responses to Pullman's The Golden Compass and the other 2 books of His Dark Materials trilogy seem to be along those lines - "We've always done it this way". Suggestions that it might be done differently, or that the current practices aren't always good, give rise to accusations of heresy. Many people are spending more time denouncing the possibility of change, rather than discussing the current practice or the the actual content of his writings.

So, whaddya think...?

Answer 3

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RE:
I just read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson...?
I don't understand why the towns people would want to stone a random person to death. I didn't like the story. What was the main point and why did they want to kill someone?

Answer 4

The main point to the story is to illustrate(which Miss jackson does so well) the "Horror behind the Harmless-lookin facade,in this case a blood ritual to ensure good crops that has been the town's secret for who-knows how many decades. Death-by-stoning is not just some archaic ritual however.In Muslim (radical I hasten to add) societies,it's still permissible to stone women to death for real or imagined indiscretions.And Bronze age peoples made human sacrifices regularly as anthropoligists have discovered.What Miss Jackson does so creepily is to simply transfer the custom to so-called "Modern Times" You should also read"The Haunting of Hill House" and"We Have Always Lived In The Castle" some of her best work
TL

Answer 5

There are many interpretations of this story. I always saw the actions of the townspeople as a metaphor for the superstitions and ignorance which have caused so much other violence in our world. The townspeople believe that if they carry out the lottery, their town will prosper. A lot of people in our world feel that violence will lead to something beneficial. In Jackson's story, by linking the violence to an age-old tradition that makes no sense to the reader, she demonstrates the foolishness of all such forms of violence.

Answer 6

the reason they killed people was because they were sacrificing them to save the crops. the oldest man actually refers to this in the story at some point. i mean, he doesnt say it right out but u get the idea.
im sure they didnt WANT to but thats just the way its always been done and they didnt want to change.
i personally thought it was a great story =]

Answer 7

Human sacrifice has taken place at many times in various places in the world. People feel the need to appease the mysterious forces of nature.
Heck, even the "sacrifice" of the mass, the body and blood of Christ, is reminiscent of that practice.

"Human sacrifice is the act of killing a human being for the purposes of making an offering to a deity or other, normally supernatural, power. It was practiced in ancient cultures. The practice has varied between different cultures, with some like the Aztecs being notorious for their ritual killings, while others have looked down on the practice as primitive. Victims were ritually killed in a manner that was supposed to please or appease gods or spirits. Victims ranged from prisoners to infants to Vestal Virgins, who suffered such fates as burning, beheading and being buried alive.
Because information on certain cultures' sacrificial tendencies often comes from outside sources (Greeks and Romans for Celts and medieval Christians for Norsemen, for example) who may have had ulterior propaganda motives, some contemporary historians consider certain allegations of human sacrifice suspect.
Over time human sacrifice has become less common around the world, and sacrifices are now very rare. Most religions condemn the practice and present-day laws generally treat it as a criminal matter. Nonetheless it is still occasionally seen today, especially in the least developed areas of the world where traditional beliefs persist."
Here a very good essay on the subject:

A sample:

"In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948 issue of the New Yorker it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received": hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse."1 It is not hard to account for this response: Jackson's story portrays an "average" New England village with "average" citizens engaged in a deadly rite, the annual selection of a sacrificial victim by means of a public lottery, and does so quite deviously: not until well along in the story do we suspect that the "winner" will be stoned to death by the rest of the villagers. One can imagine the average reader of Jackson's story protesting: But we engage in no such inhuman practices. Why are you accusing us of this?

Admittedly, this response was not exactly the one that Jackson had hoped for. In the July 22, 1948 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle she broke down and said the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."2 Shock them she did, but probably owing to the symbolic complexity of her tale, they responded defensively and were not enlightened.

The first part of Jackson's remark in the Chronicle, I suspect, was at once true and coy. Jackson's husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, has written in his introduction to a posthumous anthology of her short stories that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements."3 Jackson did not say in the Chronicle that it was impossible for her to explain approximately what her story was about, only that it was "difficult." That she thought it meant something, and something subversive, moreover, she revealed in her response to the Union of South Africa's banning of "The Lottery": "She felt," Hyman says, "that they at least understood."4 A survey of what little has been written about "The Lottery" reveals two general critical attitudes: first, that it is about man's ineradicable primitive aggressivity, or what Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren call his "all-too-human tendency to seize upon a scapegoat"; second, that it describes man's victimization by, in Helen Nebeker's words, "unexamined and unchanging traditions which he could easily change if he only realized their implications."5 Missing from both of these approaches, however, is a careful analysis of the abundance of social detail that links the lottery to the ordinary social practices of the village. No mere "irrational" tradition, the lottery is an ideological mechanism. It serves to reinforce the village's hierarchical social order by instilling the villages with an unconscious fear that if they resist this order they might be selected in the next lottery. In the process of creating this fear, it also reproduces the ideology necessary for the smooth functioning of that social order, despite its inherent inequities. What is surprising in the work of an author who has never been identified as a Marxist is that this social order and ideology are essentially capitalist.

I think we need to take seriously Shirley Jackson's suggestion that the world of the lottery is her reader's world, however reduced in scale for the sake of economy. The village in which the lottery takes place has a bank, a post office, a grocery store, a coal business, a school system; its women are housewives rather than field workers or writers; and its men talk of "tractors and taxes."6 More importantly, however, the village exhibits the same socio-economic stratification that most people take for granted in a modern, capitalist society.

for more, please go to the link below.

And see link 2, please, for another good explanation.