Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” vs. The Bystander Effect

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Shirley Jacksons “The Lottery” vs. the bystander effect
The lottery is a short story that raises several speculations and moral questions about life. In the story, a village is participating in the annual lottery. All the families in the village participate in the lottery by drawing a slip of paper for their families. It was done, and it emerged that one family (the Hutchinsons) had drawn a particular piece of paper. All the family members of the Hutchinsons were called upon to draw a new paper. It was then found that Mrs. Hutchinson drew a piece of paper with a black dot on it. The village started to stone her to death despite her protest. Killing an individual every year was a practice thought was a normal tradition of these people. However, nobody considered such event as cruel and inhuman. This ritual was practically detrimental, although all villagers remained irresponsible to create positive change in their lives. Such inactiveness and irresponsibility came as a result of the bystander effect. This paper aims to examine Jacksons’ short story (the Lottery) and the impact of the bystander effect on the characters of the story.
The short story has five instances of ironies that play an important role in illustrating author’s sarcasm. First, the title of the story “Lottery” presents an idea of winning money. Reading the title suggests an idea that a character in the story is going to win money. But when readers go through the story, they quickly become confused. The story develops in a manner different from the readers’ expectations. Here, lottery is not about winning millions of money. It is about death. The individual who wins the lottery is the most pitiful loser. Murphy presents that instead of winning million of money; she (Mrs. Hutchinson) loses sympathy of her family members and friends (284). Instead of improving life quality, she loses her precious life. The author uses auspicious title and goes further to develop suspense and catch readers’ attention. The author develops artistic appeal to develop a contrast between the readers’ expectation and the outcome of the story. That is the impact of the irony between dark death and auspicious title. The second irony is the illustration of weather in the story. The first sentence of the story describes the weather condition of the day which was a sunny and clear morning of June 27th, and it was a fresh warm day during full summer period. The flowers blossoming and grass was freshly green. It is a warm weather, and villagers can enjoy doing their activities in such an environment. Villagers conducted the event that was acceptable based on the condition that ritual was part of their tradition (Smith 27). However, it is ironical that villagers did most horrible and unkind lynching by stoning one of their own to death in a wonderful warm weather.
The third irony concerns how villagers break for lunch. The end of the first paragraph says that the lottery event took not more than two years. The villagers started at ten o’clock in the morning; it was likely that they finished the ritual and went home for lunch at noon time (Jackson 72). This indicates that villagers were unconcerned with what occurs during the ritual. They considered killing as a small event that cannot delay their lunch or distract their daily activities. These people are so unkind. How can they enjoy eating lunch after they have just killed one of their own? They were indifferent and obsessed with the antique tradition. They cannot eat lunch until they kill somebody during that specific day. Villagers wished to speed up the progress of ritual so that they finish on time. This shows how the villagers are so indifferent; they cannot take the initiative to develop better decision that could help their lives.
Another way irony is illustrated concerns fairness. Villagers think drawing pieces of paper from the box is a fair method of dealing with inconclusive issues. But it is questionable to understand why Mrs. Hutchinson screamed that the lottery was not fair. Mr. Summers did not give her adequate time to pick the paper she wanted. Moreover, people who picked the papers at first had better chances of not picking the black paper. March-Russell argues that the drawing was thought to be fair, though it was not just (386). The process was not fair for those (for example;...