The Lottery

[pegkerr]

This essay here caught my eye, considering Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" as a capitalist critique. I find it kinda convincing, myself.

Discuss.

Do you remember the first time you read "The Lottery"? Did it have much of an impact on you?

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I read it when I was a freshman in high school, and it was exactly the wrong timing for the same reason as it was probably exactly the right timing for some people: I was up to my ears with melodrama and the idea of being persecuted, that "they would kill me if they could!" I was surrounded by it, and it didn't ring any more true to me in "The Lottery" than it did in the angsty teens around me. This impression was not alleviated when they did it as a school play and one of my friends was encouraged to shriek her lungs out, not that it took much encouragement.

It was more MESSAGE than worldbuilding, and that didn't work well for me. The fact that it had been written as a sort of anytown made me evaluate it on the notion of whether it really could happen here, because I felt I was being pushed to have that impression.