Individuality vs Community in Shirley Jacksons The Lottery Essay

Individuality versus club in The Lottery The works of Shirley Jackson tend to the macabre because she typically unveils the hidden side of human nature in her short stories and novels. She typically explores the darker side of human nature. Her themes are wide-ranging and border on the unrealistic though they usually portray everyday, ordinary people. Her endings are a good deal non a resolution but rather a question pertaining to alliance and individuality that the reader must ask himself or herself. Jacksons design characters often are in possession of an abnormal psyche. Children are portrayed as blank slates ready to learn the ways of the world from society. However, adults have a hidden side already formed and lurking beneath the perceived normalcy of the established social order. We percolate this best in Jacksons most celebrated short story, The Lottery. Jacksons uses many elements of fiction to demonstrate how human nature stool become desensitized to the point of m ob murder of a member of their avouch community. One of the ways she does this is through character. While the shocking reason cigarette the lottery and the gruesome prize for its winner are not authentic until the ending, the characters come back to haunt us for their desensitized behavior earlier in the story. For example, the children in the beginning of the story innocently gather st anes as normal children might, yet their relish in doing so becomes macabre once we settle out the purpose for which that are collecting them Bobby Martin hard already stuffed his pockets abounding of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroy...eventually made a outstanding pile of stones in one ... ...re many similarities when it comes to technique, characterization, themes, and ideologies based on the authors witness beliefs and life experiences. However, we also see that it appears the author herself often struggles with the issue of creation herself and expressing her own individuality, or obeying the rules, regulations and mores of a society into which she was born an innocent child, one who by nature of her sex was deemed inferior to men who controlled the definition of the norms. We see this kind of environment as repressive and responsible for abnormal psyches in the plots of many of her works. WORKS CITED Jackson, S. The Lottery. (Internet) 1-8. Jackson, S. We Have Always Lived In The Castle. New York, Penguin, 1962. Mukamel, E. The unruly Individual In The Works Of Shirley Jackson. http//www.askjeeves.com, May 13, 2004, 1-7.