“The Lottery” is a short story written by the famous writer Shirley Jackson in 1943. The Lottery tells the story of a small village that holds a lottery every year to decide which person from the village is going to be stoned by the other villagers. However, the reader does not know about this until the very end. In the first paragraph, Jackson describes the lottery in a way that it creates uncertainty. She starts creating so much suspense that the reader may feel uneasy, anxious or disturbed since he/she may not fully understand what the lottery is about. As far as we know, lotteries are generally played in a different way, with papers or numbers and players usually receive a nice reward, such as money and nice objects. However, in Jackson’s story, the reader is not sure why the villagers are meeting up in the center of the village or why the children from the village are collecting and stones. So, the way Jackson starts this story makes the readers read until the very end in order to find out what is actually going on.
