Themes

Author’s Note: This is a response to the short story, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson on page 256. I will be explaining and supporting the theme/main idea. Hope you like it!  In the story, “The Lottery” they whole community has a lottery, but this is not a regular lottery where you want to win. Each man of the family picks out a card of a black box, and if the black box has the winning numbers and/or a big, bold, black dot, congratulations, you just won and you are about to have stones thrown at you until you die. This whole story is about power/equality, and hope. I say this story is about power because the men have the power in the community… When they say stuff to kids, the kids only listen to the men; they have to do everything for their wives/girlfriends. I would say equality because it's a girl that "won" the lottery. Considering that this is a bad thing, it wasn't fair and it was a coincidence that a woman had to die as "winning the lottery" instead of a man. The ladies definitely were NOT equal to men. Lastly, I say hope because all these people who are grabbing a paper have to have a lot of faith and hope that they DON'T win… because if they do; it won't be very great at all. It will be a bad moment for them. So basically what I'm trying to say is; the men have the power, the ladies are not equal to the men, and they all have to have hope to not win "the lottery". These are the main themes in the short story, "The Lottery." In conclusion, these few themes I discussed and supported explain the story in a different way. In this particular story, it has many, many themes, but these are what my group and I discussed earlier, and thought were the main ones. Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about themes! 