The Lottery Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

The lottery is like an 800-pound gorilla of symbols in this story. It's in the title, for Pete's sake. Where do we even begin? Well, let's start with the lottery as a way of upsetting reader expect...

The black box is a physical manifestation of the villagers' connection to tradition; Jackson is pretty explicit on this point, when the subject of replacing the box comes up: "No one liked to upset...

Critic Helen Nebeker argues that the three legs of the stool are like the three aspects of the Christian Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit); the use of the stool to support...

Well, as the narrator observes, "[the villagers] still [remember] to use the stones" (76). Not only is stoning a particularly horrifying way to imagine dying, it's also, always, a crowd-generated d...