The lottery door Shirley Jackson

Title: The Lottery
I think it’s a good title because it’s about a lottery and the winner gets a lot of stones to his or hers head thrown
The Dutch translation of the title is de loterij

Author: Shirley Jackson has written the lottery. She is born in San Francisco, her date of birth is 14 December 1916 and she died at 8 August 1965 in north Bennington. She wrote some other books like: The Haunting, Hosszú alkony, The lottery, Come Along with Me and Lizzie.

Time: The story plays in a little town with only 300 villagers on June the 27th somewhere between 1940 and 1960. The whole story takes 21 minutes of your free time. I think it can’t play in the year 2006.

Place: The village square of the town is a very important place in the story because it’s the place were everybody came together for the Lottery.

Structure: I think It’s a drama story, because in the story someone is thrown by rocks.

Narrator: It’s a story told by the writer because you can not know in the story what some people think.

Characters: One of the important characters is wearing fades house dresses and a sweater. The most important family is the Hutchinson family, because one of the family members won the Lottery.

Theme: The theme of the short story is life and death, because at the end one will probably die and the rest shall live. It’s a story to enjoy the reader of it, it’s not a story to learn something about it.

Summary: Somewhere in a village there is going to be a lottery. Everybody is going to gather around the village square to join the lottery. Some children are picking up stones in one of the corners of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. When the postmaster puts a black box on the middle of the village square. The box has been used every year but is getting old and some villagers want to having a new black box but the keeper of the black box wont it to get a new one or to build a new one because this was the box which was constructed when the fist people settled down to make the village here. There were going some minutes past, and then finally the lottery will begin. The postmaster will read the heads of the families in alphabetic way and they have to pick as much papers as the family is being with. Finally everybody had been taken a paper and showed it each paper was blank accept one, the one with the black spot on it and it’s in Mrs Hutchinson. So her husband said: “Let’s finish quickly.” Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. Some children had already had taken stones so they hasn’t got to take stones. All of a sudden everybody is going to throw with stones to Mrs Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson screamed: ”It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.” And then everybody was upon her.

Personal opinion: I liked the part when you discover that the lottery isn’t a lottery to win something but to lose your life. The part when everybody was throwing stones at the person who won the lottery. I would give this story a 9 because you have to think very hard to get a story like this on paper and because of the words it’s not to difficult and not to easy to understand the words.