"The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is one of the essential American short stories. Not only do people tend to know it, they tend to know its biography, that its publication on June 26, 1948 caused a horrified cavalcade of cancelled subscriptions. It has all the hallmarks of allegorical fable, with minimally defined characters, a nameless location, and sparse exposition, so it’s easy to read into it, to interpret it in a way that supplies what Jackson’s brief tale deliberately lacks.

Since the public reaction and the elusive meaning are what I always see people talk about when they talk about “The Lottery,” I wanted to veer away from all that and talk about the text itself. Specifically, I wanted to zero in on four particular lines.

The children assembled first, of course.

That “of course” does so much work here. Early New Yorker fiction was often selected to feel stylistically in-tune with the magazine’s “casuals,” chatty but limpid pieces of first-person narration, ordinary life elevated by sharp observation¹; “The Lottery” is late enough that it doesn’t need to adhere to those guidelines, but it feels like it’s naturally sprung from them. This has a somewhat conversational approach, but Jackson prunes away all the sloppiness and keeps the intimacy.

“Of course” says we know what she’s talking about (this is that “making the audience complicit” we’ve all heard so much about, deployed with more economy than usual). “Of course” says that this isn’t a coincidence. There are two possibilities here, one ritualistic—this is How Things Are Done—and one commonsensical in its horror—the children are first in the same way they’re the first up on Christmas Day.

The rest of the year, the box was put away, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’s barn and another year underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there.

Jackson spends quite a bit of time on the box that holds the lottery slips, and this turns out to be part of the setup for a grim, precise kind of joke, which I’ll get to in a bit. The box is surprisingly battered for something that’s only taken out once a year, and Jackson sets up its state of ill-repair before she contextualizes it here. What first seems like a lapse from the rite’s formalism is, Jackson implies here, part of the rite. The lottery doesn’t belong to the figures who officiate it. Like the black spot that marks the sacrifice, the box goes to whom it will, almost at random.

This line also hits on another key element of the lottery: the diffuse, communal responsibility. Everything about the ritual is designed to concentrate victimhood but spread out guilt. Only one person dies, and everyone is responsible, but, you know, are they really? They don’t feel that way, not when they’re excused by longstanding tradition, not when even the victim’s son has a few pebbles to throw, not when it will take a lot of stones to bring Tessie Hutchinson down.

Jackson writes about the box’s whereabouts in a way that shows us how the town thinks of it. It’s not that Mr. Graves lays it down beside a hay bale in his barn or the Martins keep it on a shelf in the grocery; the box is the subject of the sentence. “It was set on a shelf,” but we’re not invited to think too closely about who set it there. The box is. The lottery is. The box has been other places, just as the lottery has had other traditions, but all the decisions here—all the choices—were made fuzzily long ago, by someone else, or by everyone.

The people separated good-humoredly to let her through; two or three people said, in voices loud enough to be heard across the crowd, “Here comes your Missus Hutchinson,” and “Bill, she made it after all.”

One of my favorite details of prose in “The Lottery” is how often we get multiple speakers in a single paragraph. This is not technically “correct,” and it’s not a stylistic choice that Jackson, who writes clear, precise, and usually grammatical prose even in folksy pieces, deploys very often. (Look at all the semicolons. They do my heart good.) But she does it here, because the true speaker is the town. For now, Mrs. Hutchinson is a part of it, able to say her lines crowded up against everyone else’s. There’s no separation between her and her fellows.

After she draws the black square, that’s not true anymore—not in the story, and not in the style. After that, Mrs. Hutchinson’s dialogue stands starkly alone every time.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

This is where all of Jackson’s well-built sentences pay off, because the cruel flow of this is artistic perfection. It’s a bleak punchline, and it’s one that wouldn’t have half the impact it does without her impeccable sense of rhythm and logic. Even a small change in the construction—“The villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, but they still remembered to use stones”—makes it worse and less effective; it keeps the meaning but loses the punch. The “although” creates a suspense: from the start of the sentence, we’re waiting for the end, for the contrast. That “still” is exactly right, too, implying an Old Man Warner’s relief at this continued tradition even as it’s instilling horror in the reader.²

I suspect we’ll never see Jackson’s like again.

1. See The World She Edited, by Amy Reading. ↩︎
2. And of course the word “stones” comes exactly when it should. I can see a good writer accidentally writing the version of the sentence I tried out, but the one even a halfway decent author would fix on revision would be “The villagers still remembered to use stones, even though they had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box.” Good horror has to be as well-paced as comedy. ↩︎