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¶ … Lottery" and "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Ursula LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" are both short stories that relate society's tolerance and apathy of needless pain and cruelty for the sake of superstition and tradition.
Each story is set in a small village or town and centers on a yearly festive occasion. LeGuin's story takes place in the town of Omelas during the Festival of Summer celebration, while Jackson's story is set in an unnamed village on June 27th, the day of the town's yearly lottery.
LeGuin describes the people of Omelas as happy, though "they were not simple folk ... But do not say the words of cheer much any more ... All smile have become archaic" (LeGuin pp). She goes on to write that the people of Omelas "have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid ... Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting ... If it hurts, repeat it" (LeGuin pp). The way LeGuin describes the citizens of her fictional town leads one to believe that they have become jaded to both joy and pain, as if they are jaded by life itself....
LeGuin writes, "to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy" (LeGuin pp).
Jackson, on the other hand describes the citizens of her unnamed village as rather ordinary, carrying on with their lives, their work, school, and house chores, as anyone any where might. Jackson gives barely a hint that anything is amiss in this village that would set it apart from any other village in any other time. Even as she begins to describe the lottery, its process and tradition, the citizens still seem to be just and loyal. Jackson writes that in towns that were very populated, the lottery might take up to two days and so began days earlier that the 27th, however, in this village, there were only three hundred people and so the whole process took less than two hours, "so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner" (Jackson pp).
The first hint that something might be sinister in Jackson's story is when the village boys make a "great pile of stones in…
Work Cited
Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery."
http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Jackson/lottery
LeGuin, Ursula K. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."
http://pencible.tripod.com/pande/omelas.htm
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