The Lottery

2 Pages 519 Words

When I think of a lottery, I picture someone swimming in a pool of money, throwing the bills into the air, just to have the joy of watching them float back down to their side. I thought that’s where this story was going, because that's how the author sets it up. But even before the tragic end to this story, I started to pick up on some unusual things.
First of all, I found the town way too skittish and rather uneasy. I know that I would be nervous for a lottery too, but not to the extent where I feel sick over it. That’s the kind of feeling that I got for the town. “...most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around.” This quote makes me pictures a mob of people standing around the black box and Mr. Summers. All of them trying not to make eye contact, staring at their shoes, praying they get to live another year.
I went back over this story and read it twice, the second time I highlighted all of the things that I found unusual or interesting. If you look at my paper, almost half of every page is highlighted.
Something I noticed was that the women would refer to their husbands as their ‘old man’. I wasn’t quite sure why they did that, but then I thought about the entire story. These people have been growing up in this village for probably their whole lives and each year they take the chance, live or die. If these are grown men in their thirties, forties and fifties, that's quite a long time if there’s a chance that you maybe picked to die in the next year. Old Man Warner was only 77 years old and he was the oldest man in the village. That isn’t even close to what people normally live too. When you’ve got this lottery going on, of course it’s amazing for someone to live 77 years and never get picked especially if there are only 300 people in the town.
At first I thought that this town and all of the other towns that participate in the lottery had no real value for life. But ...