The Purpose of the Lottery: A Short Summary

In The Lottery, several towns participate in a gruesome annual ritual where one person is selected each year to be stoned to death. I believe the ritual had no practical purpose and was performed only for the sake of religion, mostly because of the way the people of these isolated towns treat the core of the lottery, the black box.

On page 15, lines 55-58, the civic activities director Mr. Summers walks into the town square carrying the ever-mysterious black wooden box.

Later, on lines 62-66, the text says, “The villagers kept their distance between themselves and the stool, and when Mr. Summers said, Some of you fellows want to give me a hand? there was a hesitation before two men… came forward to hold the box”. When considering the villagers’ reluctance to stand within a few meters of the thing, I think the villagers see the box as a bad omen. And that reasoning is justified; A single slip of paper out of the box will kill one member of the population.

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On page 16 line 75-77, the text states, “...no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box.” Naturally, any doubt of the rites would be blasphemy because the members of this town, at least, have faith in their religion. Even if they no longer remember which religion it is, its origin, or any of its scriptures, faith is a powerful force. Powerful enough, in fact, to change people’s morals about killing their family members.

On page 27, lines 400 and 401, Bill Hutchinson shows no mercy for his wife when he forces the condemning slip of paper out of her hand. What happened to conscience? Morality? Ethics? This is a very similar situation to the Milgram Shock study, where volunteers believed they were administering electric shocks to other participants[1]. In summary, the experiment proved the greater obedience of morally questionable orders if the “agents” think the responsibility will be transferred to a superior that has a legal base. This can’t translate to the lottery, however. The presence of “experimenters”, even if they were just actors, was crucial to the volunteers’ compliance. In The Lottery, no such authority figure is present.

Or maybe there was. On page 16, lines 71-73 the text reads, “...the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born.” We can find Old Man Warner’s age on line 280, page 23. You have to be at least 16 years old to draw your family's name, and he says he’s been drawing for 77 years. Therefore we can discern that the second box was put into use over 96 years before the events of this story. And that’s just the second box! The original was made when the town was established. The original intention of the lottery, its purported purpose, and most importantly, the inventors of the lottery, were lost long ago. Picture a new settlement struggling to make ends meet. They can’t support themselves with their newly planted fields without tremendous effort. Morale couldn’t be lower, and they think everything is going to waste until one group comes up with the idea of a lottery. They say they’ve read their great idea in the movement of the stars, planets, or the moon. As long as it is convincing enough to gain the trust of the other settlers, it’s possible. Through some method, they gain the trust of the rest of the settlers. This group preaches that the only way the settlement will live past this season is if they sacrifice one person as a part of an annual ritual. The first lottery is carried out, but some people hesitate to kill a person who has traveled so far with them. We know this because, on page 17, lines 98-100, the text says, “Chips of wood… had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing…” We can infer from this that the people think three hundred is a large population, so they couldn’t have had more than a few tens of people to begin with. During this hesitation, however, is where the self-proclaimed “priests” come in. Using a series of verbal triggers like in the Milgram experiment (“Please continue”, “The ritual requires that you continue”, and “You have no other choice but to continue”), the elite caste would gain the compliance of everybody who is not already cooperating. Eventually, the inventors of the lottery would die and the original rules and intentions with them, but the tradition would remain. The first generation continuing the lottery after their deaths would be stuck between the obvious choice of discontinuing the ritual and the punishment of acting without support from their peers. In this stalemate, there is one determining factor to their obedience; the black box, the last symbol of the religion. How strongly people believed in serving the black box would certainly tip the balance between progression from a terrible past and dwelling with the same processes that have no logical base. The conscious human mind would resist being “told” what to do by an inanimate object, but the unconscious sections have no such quarrel. The people of this town are acting as though they are bound by religion, even if they are not aware of which religion it is or who (or in this case, what) they are worshiping. There is never any excuse for mercilessly condemning a family member to death, as Mr. Hutchinson does on page 27, lines 400-401, but I think it is safe to say that they aren’t bad people necessarily, just operating with the worst possible instructions engraved during their childhoods.

Some people might claim that the true reason of the lottery is to enhance crop growth because of the quote on page 22, lines 260-261. The text says, “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon’.” I think this is just a remnant of the inventors’ attempts to build the people’s trust in the lottery’s religion. In contrast, human remains are rich in salt, which is toxic for most plants and would actually hinder harvest sizes[2]. Another view on the lottery is that it was made to reduce population sizes. Recalling the number of three hundred for this town’s population, I find it difficult to imagine that the killing of one person would have a great effect on anything but the inhabitants’ morale.

The only claim I see as accurate and supported by the text is that the lottery was a ritual centered around worshiping the black box. The way the people of this behind-the-times town act when handling the box, the similarities to one infamous experiment in July of 1961, and the sense of duty they have to murder one of their own every year is evidence that is clear enough to convince me of my claim.