A lottery is a method of raising money by selling tickets with numbers on them. When those numbers are drawn by chance, people who have the winning numbers win prizes. Lotteries are popular in many countries around the world and are often used as a form of taxation.
The short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is a classic example of the scapegoating nature of lotteries. Jackson reveals how societies, especially those organized around a sense of shared tradition, will often persecute members of the group to mark their boundaries and to valorize the group’s ideals. While Jackson’s story may seem off-putting in its cruelty, it is important to remember that her point was a fundamental one about the human cost of invented national traditions.
In this story, a group of villagers gathers in the town square for its yearly lottery. Children recently on summer break are the first to assemble, and then adult men begin to arrive. The narrator suggests that the villagers are a very particular kind of small-town population because they exhibit the stereotypically normal behavior of warmly gossiping while they wait for the event to begin.
The villagers then start to select stones from the pile that were prepared earlier by the children. As they do so, Mrs. Delacroix and Mr. Summers (who are presumably the organizers of this particular lottery) supply them with pebbles, insinuating that everyone must participate. Finally, Tessie is selected as the scapegoat. She tries to protest that she is not being treated fairly, but the villagers start hurling stones at her.