Feature of "Lottery"

THE LOTTERY

MIGUEL ARMANDO CHACÓN PLANAS

Life is a lottery game where we play dairy the moments. We have to enjoy every minute of it, because you never know when is the time to loose. Learn how to value the people around us, because even if we want to change the destiny, you can’t. Sometimes life puts in our way, friends that help us to become better persons every day, and that inspire us to fight for what we want. Some other times we run into bad people, people that only hurt us, and without think in it, they make us stronger.

As a reader, I understand that the position of the author is against all the things that us, as human beings are able to do when is a tradition in between. This story shows a community of seemingly average, peaceful citizens who participate in a awful ritual of violence, killing and death. The village is shown to be a collection of nice, hardworking people who are appear to be like many typical communities. Yet they have a tradition that singles out an individual to be madly killed. These people spend much of their time as neighbors and friends, yet their ritual make them to randomly choose a person as the  target for their cruelty, and it is carried out without grief.

Something else that the author is pointing out is that we need to be aware of the danger of tradition.  Just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean that there is not a better, more efficient, more humane way of dealing with the issue.  As times change and technology advances, our procedures, techniques, and reasons for doing things in a particular way or at a particular time of year should be re-examined. And in some how modified. Insomuch as the evolution of the human raze.

One special thing about "The Lottery" is the danger of tradition and blindly following along. The characters in the story simply follow the tradition of the lottery because that is all they have ever done. They don't quite rethink how the lottery started. They don't rethink all of the original ceremonies. They just perform it as best they can because it has always been done. In other words they don´t think, they kill. They follow the traditions and rules without asking themselves the simplest question “Why are we doing this?”.

Certainly the villagers must believe murder and violence are wrong, for the village seems a nice, safe place. The villagers seem rational and peaceful enough too. Yet when Mrs. Hutchinson's “wins” the lottery, the entire community doesn't hesitate to turn on her. No one, other than Hutchinson herself, seems to question what is happening, even-though one must assume that Hutchinson, as part of the community, has helped stone to death previous lottery winners. Even though, trying to find an explanation of why they did what they did, is impossible to find a reason or an argument of her own son throwing the first stone.

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