Curtis Zhang
6/2/20
The Lottery
The Lottery is a short story in which all the townspeople gather together for a lottery. As the Story progresses, however, the story takes a dark turn, as winning the lottery is not a good thing and is instead a death sentence by stoning. This story shows lots of irony in the story that you don’t know that is a form of irony until you get to the big plot twist.
The story first shows a very obvious irony as the name “The Lottery” implied that the villagers gathering up and the people getting picked were going to get lucky and earn some money or some kind of prize, but the Author presents a sort of irony as it was not for a prize but a death sentence. The Author does this in a very subtle way, giving subtle hints to the fact of the matter. On page 1, it even tells you that the boys of the village “-eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.” This is alluding to the fact that they are going to be stoned, but it is very hard to make that connection if you do not know what is going to happen. There are many other subtle hints that the lottery is bad and you are going to die if you get chosen, including the fact that the town continued to come to one individual for the lottery, which would not really make too much sense because the family could just share the benefit, but you would not make the connection if you did not know what was going to happen.
There are many forms of irony in the story such as the fact that some other towns nearby had gotten rid of the lottery and they laughed at the other towns for getting rid of the lottery, which sounds reasonable until you learn what the lottery really is about. “Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.”” Tessie is also perfectly fine with the lottery, as it is with most if not all of the other townspeople, until she is chosen, at which point she says that it is not fair that she has to die. One more form of irony the story is the fact that the lottery is so old that the second lottery box was put into use even before the oldest man in the town, Old Man Warner, was even born. Even so, they still choose to follow the long standing tradition of stoning a person to death every year.
The last form of Irony that I found in the short story was the fact that even though Tessie showed concern for herself and her family after her family was chosen for the second part of the ceremony, her own children even participated in the stoning of their own mom, which is a very chilling thought. That means that the Lottery must be very influential within the town, since the townspeople were willing to sacrifice their own friend/mom to appease a heavenly deity or something of that sort that might not even be real.
The Lottery is a very ironic story because the story seems like a regular story at first, but as the end of the story, lots of irony shows up at parts that you would least expect to. There are very dark pieces of irony like the fact that the Lottery was for a death sentence, and less dark pieces of irony such as Old Man Warner laughing at people doing the morally correct thing.