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Example research essay topic: Story Takes Place Shirley Jackson - 1,769 words

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April Rangel English 1302 Lola King October 5, 2000 OUTLINE Thesis: The short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson found in Perrines Literature written by Thomas R. Arp is a story full of symbolism. I. Names are used to represent different aspects of the story. a. Mr.

Summers is a bright and cheerful man. His attitude, demeanor, and name represent the summer. Mr. Graves name represents what is about to happen. They are sending someone to their grave.

These names are obvious as to what they mean. b. Mrs. Delacroix's name comes from the Latin word for crucifix.

Mr. And Mrs. Adams name is used to represent humanity. These names you have to look a little more deeply into. II.

The items used to hide the lottery are also significant in their own way. a. A black box is used to holds the slips of paper that will be drawn. The black box represents tradition and a coffin.

b. One of the little slips of paper in the box contains a black dot. Whoever pulls that slip of paper is the winner of the lottery. III.

Even the time period in this is a symbol used by the writer. a. The story takes place in the twentieth century somewhere around the 1930 s. b.

We are aware of this by the clothes they are wearing and what the men are talking about. Author Summary Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco, California on December 14, 1919. The family left California and moved to New York when she was sixteen. At age twenty Shirley enrolled at the University of Syracuse. There she met Stanley Edgar Hyman. Her and Hyman were later married in 1940.

Her literary production increased tremendously after her marriage and the birth of their four children. Unfortunately with all of her success she was still human, with human problems. She was an agoraphobic and severely depressed. The may be why her stories are so far out in left field compared to what was being written at the time, and even today. Her writing was an outlet for her and this lead so many successful works of literature. Shirley Jacksons stories always seem to center on one thing: almost every story is about a protagonists discovering or failing to discover or successfully ignoring an alternate way of perceiving a set of circumstances or the world.

Often a change in the characters perspective leads to terror, anxiety, neurosis, or even loss of their identity. Jacksons most notable work The Lottery is a ghastly story that tells of the way people blindly follow traditions and conform to their society. She also published many short stories in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, Womans Day, The Hudson Review, and The Yale Review. She also published novels such as The Road Through the Wall, and the Haunting of Hill House, before her death in 1965. Jacksons reputation is widely known and has yet to start to diminish. Her works of literature may scare people sometime but their effects and the impact they have on their readers dont seem to be fading as the years go by.

April Rangel English 1302 Lola King October 5, 2000 Symbolism in The Lottery The short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson found in Perrines Literature written by Thomas R. Arp is a story full of symbolism. The yearly lottery is an event that has taken place on June 27, every year for as long as anyone can remember. For this lottery every member of the community gathers in the town square mid morning to participate.

Every head of household draws a slip of paper from the traditional black box. One of those slips has a black dot on it. Whoever gets the black dot must then put their paper back and each member of his family must draw a slip. Whichever one draws the black dot is then the lottery winner. The community without any sense of remorse or sorrow then stones this person to death. The Lottery uses symbolism to give you insight and to foreshadow what is to come at the end of the lottery.

As you read the story you can pick out the symbolism in the names of the townspeople, items used in the lottery, and even the time period in which the story is set. The names of the townspeople in the story all represent something that has to do with the story. Mr. Summers is the lottery official. He is a bright and cheerful man, with plenty of energy. His demeanor and attitude toward everything suggests the cheerfulness of the season of summer.

His name represents the fact that the lottery takes place on June 27 a week after the summer solstice. Mr. Graves is another character with a significant name. He is Mr. Summers assistant, who watches the black box that. Amy Griffin says that his name give a suggestion to the dark undertone of the lottery (Griffin).

Mr. Warner is the oldest man in the community. When people start talking about getting rid of the lottery he warns them that they should not stray from tradition. Pack of crazy fools, he said. Listening to the young folks, nothings good enough for them. Next thing you know, theyll want to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while.

Used to be a saying about Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. First thing you know, wed all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. Theres always been a lottery, he added petulantly (Arp 425). You can see from these remarks that Old Man Warner has no desire to give up the lottery. He is an old person with old views and thinks only bad things will come from breaking tradition. Mrs.

Delacroix's name isnt as blatant as the other but just as symbolic. The root Croix from Delacroix means crucifix. Jay Yarmove thinks that her name is a foreshadowing of what is to become of Tissue. (Raymond) Peter Koneke also informs us that Mr. and Mrs. Adams, whose last name is a suggestion of humanity, try to speak up against the lottery before they are quieted by Old Man Warner. (Koneke) They are the two that still have the morals to know that what they are doing is wrong. These names all have a meaning that helps to tell the story.

The names of the townspeople are used to give you insight to the true meaning of the lottery before its intentions are revealed. The items used in the story to hold the lottery are also significant in their own way. The box that the lottery papers are held in is an old worn black box. The box itself has two different meanings. It is an old box that is worn out from many years of use.

Even so the lottery has been going on in this town for so long that this is not the original box, but rather a second box made from scraps left over from the first. The use of the pieces of the first box in the second and the fact that they will not trade the old box in for something new hints to us that they are very set in their ways and dont want to break any significant part of the tradition. This box also represents a coffin. A coffin is a large box that holds a dead person. This box is a box that holds the name of a dead people. Unfortunately nobody knows whose name the box holds.

The little slips of paper that they use for the lottery are all blank except one. That one slip of paper has a big black dot on it. We often think of black as the color of death. The black dot represents death. Bill Hutchison went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr.

Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office. (Arp 428) The time period of this story is also very symbolic. The story takes place somewhere in the twentieth century. Yarmove tells us Jackson lets us know the time of the lottery at the outset of the story (Yarmove). Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes (422). The presence of tractors shows us that this takes place in the twentieth century.

We are also told that Mr. Summers is wearing a clean white shirt and blue jeans. Blue jeans were not around and predominant until the twentieth century. This makes the story close to home, instead of set back in the dark ages. The fact that it was set only a few decades ago makes the storys ending even more horrifying and unreal. No one wants to believe that such a thing could happen in modern day America.

Yarmove states There were many Americans who, after the end of World War II and the revelations of the early Nuremburg e trials in 1945 and 1946, smugly asserted that such atrocities could happen in Nazi Germany but not in the United States (Yarmove). Jackson shook the world with this short story since it was published in 1948. The Lottery is full of symbolism that helps to make the story more real and more alive. The story can evoke emotions within you by using this literary technique. This is a true horror story. People do not want to believe that such things could still take place in everyday America.

The thought of this occurring scares people and makes them wonder just how civilized we really are. Work Cited Thomas R. Arp, Perrines Literature (Harcourt Brace College Publishers: Fort Worth, Philadelphia, San Diego, New York, Orlando, Austin, San Antonio, Toronto, Montreal, London, Sydney, Tokyo) Dedria Bryfonski ed. , Contemporary Literary Criticisms Vol. 11 (Detroit Washington D. C. London: Gale Research Inc. , 1979) Frank N. Magill ed. , Critical Survey Of Fiction Vol.

HUG-MIS (Pasadena, Ca; Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Salem Press, 1983) Roger Match ed. , Contemporary Literary Criticisms Vol. 60 (Detroit Washington D. C. London: Gale Research Inc. , 1990) Griffin, Amy. Jacksons The Lottery. Explicator Fall 99, Vol. 58 Issue 1. p 44, 3 p Yarmove, Jay A.

Jacksons The Lottery. Explicator, Summer 94, Vol. 52 Issue 4, p 24 Bibliography My name is April. I am a college soph more and i got an a- on this paper so im not making any promises.


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Research essay sample on Story Takes Place Shirley Jackson

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