¶ … Lottery" and "The Most Dangerous Game"
At first glance, the slow tension built up in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" seems to mark the story as wholly distinct from the over-the-top adventure in Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game," but closer examination reveals a number of points in which the two tales seem to engage in a shared discourse regarding the value of human life. "The Lottery" features an ostensibly civil society maintained through a brutal, retrograde ritual of collective murder, and "The Most Dangerous Game" chronicles the exploits of a retired general hunting his most recent (human) quarry. By examining the extent to which the characters in either story do or do not value human life and the implications this has for the larger society in which they live, one may understand the way in which all forms of governance, whether aristocratic or egalitarian, authoritarian or democratic, ultimately rely on a devaluing of human life and autonomy in the service of power.
The village of "The Lottery" is undoubtedly intended to evoke images of a nearly-ideal community in the northeastern United States, so that the lottery itself may be taken as an intpretation of American democracy. A number of textual details support this intepretation, because although the location and time period of the story are never explicitly mentioned, the fact that "the town has a population of about 300 […] farming seems to be the normal way of making a living [….] most of the names are Anglo-Saxon," and "the land yields an abundance of stones [….] seems to point to New England as the locale of the story" (Yarmove 242). Similarly, the clothing and technology mentioned, such as tractors and blue jeans, seems to suggest that the story takes place near the time of its writing in the middle of the twentieth century (Jackson). The effect is to create a picture of peaceful Americana that lulls the reader into a comfortable complacency, because even as the lottery begins, the villagers casually joke with each other (Jackson). The story wants an American reader to feel comfortable, because the climatic terror of the story comes from the violent disruption of this comfort.
It is important to note that the story almost certainly takes twentieth-century American democracy as its target, because certain textual details have led critics to view "The Lottery" in ways that ultimately cloud the critical, ideological work done by the story, because the lottery admittedly bears some similarities to certain religious practices. For example, Nayef Ali Al-Joulan sees "The Lottery" as reflecting "Jackson's vague, confused, superficial and stereotypical perception of Islam and Islamic rituals due to "the symbolic black-box [seen as a stand-in for the Kaaba in Mecca], stoning, the status of women, the fixed annual date(s) of the lottery, and the act of calling the participants in the lottery five times," whereas Amy Griffin views the story as a reiteration of the archetypal scapegoat seen in the Judeo-Christian heritage (Al-Joulan 29, Griffin 44). While the belief that a "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon" represents the same kind of superstition that is the foundation of all religion, the actual ritual of the lottery is far more akin to a civic process rather than a religious one (Jackson). In fact, the lottery is only run by Mr. Summers because he has "time and energy to devote to civic activities" such as "squares dances" and "the teen club" (Jackson). This is not to suggest that there is no religious content in "The Lottery," but rather to argue that the more interesting target is democracy (especially because it is neither new nor surprising to suggest that religion devalues human life through the ritualization and legitimation of murder).
The story's condemnation of the violent potential inherent in democracy comes when Mrs. Hutchinson is finally attacked. Her death is not instigated by a single person, because "such action would be deemed 'murder'" (Griffin 45). Instead, the villagers all stone her together, dissipating the guilt across society in much the same way that the state-sanctioned murder of individuals is "legitimized" because twelve people decide that someone needs to die, either out of a desire for collective revenge or in the foolhardy assumption that official
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