Traditions in A Moment Before the Gun Went Off and The Lottery :: Shirley Jackson Lottery

In the stories "A Moment before The Gun Went Off" and "The Lottery," there is the situation in which a group of people cling to traditions very blindly. In both stories the traditions are so dug into the people's way of life that questioning them is considered sacrilege within these communities. Furthermore, the members of the community no longer even remember why the traditions were set up in the fist place. They follow the traditions simply because their predecessors followed the traditions. Another similarity between the communities in both stories is, even though these traditions are firmly entrenched in these communities, they are rapidly losing there grip in other communities. This detail is not only mentioned in both stories, but looked down upon by communities that still follow the traditions. In the story "The Lottery," the tradition is to hold a lottery on a specific summer day, but instead of winning a cash prize or some other good thing, the winner gets to be stoned to death by the members of the community. The character that is mentioned most in this story is one by the name of Mrs. Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson is a devoted mother and housewife. She is the one who eventually gets singled out to win the lottery. So it is Mrs. Hutchinson who is impacted the most brutally by the lottery. However the other people of the village are affected differently by the lottery. It is very unlikely that the people of the village kill people for the sake of killing people. More likely there is a deeper reason. One possibility is that the people of this village of this village are looking for a scapegoat. A person to take the blame for mistakes and sins of others, so one person dies for a community and saves the community from whatever sins that had been committed. The society can be affected in many ways by the lottery. Other neighbor societies have been affected by the lottery, many have abandoned the tradition of the lottery. Even in the community where the story takes place many of the rituals that go along with the lottery are fading into the past to be forgotten forever. An example of this would be the chant that originally went with the