Winners among us: social dynamics and achievement

¶ … innovative tradition. Many great authors began their careers by writing short stories. Many authors whom were/are already successful practice and hone their craft by writing short stories. In the 21st century, there are many writers who specialize in short story writing, and there are in fact, new genres of short story writing in fiction, such as flash fiction, which are super short stories. Short stories provide authors a space where there are fewer rules than longer forms of fiction and even nonfiction. Short stories, in a way, are like poetry. Though poems are often bound and structured by many kinds of forms and cadences, poetry is one of the most expressive and difficult forms of literature to construct. The same goes for short stories. Short stories, at first glance, are superficially simple, yet in order to exploit the genre to its fullest and deliver a poignant or gripping emotional impact, an author must be quite skilled. The focus of this paper will be a comparative analysis of two short stories -- one by Shirley Jackson, and the other by the renowned DH Lawrence. Lawrence is known primarily for his passionate, romantic, and sometimes illicit novels, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover. The paper will elaborate upon aspects of the stories such as the author's purpose or theme, the overall plot & structure of the stories, as well as the tone and style of the writing. The paper will argue that there exist a number of differences between the stories, but there are intriguing parallels and overlaps in many areas that are not superficial.

Both stories are examples of irony, certainly. Jackson's story, "The Lottery," is a complete exercise in irony, as is Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner." When the average person, particularly the average United States citizen thinks of the lottery, this person thinks of vast sums of money and abundance of jubilation. If in the United States, the average person may generally associate the word "lottery" with the state lottery, Publisher's Clearinghouse, or lotteries regarding sports drafts, as in baseball, football, basketball, etc. The point is that the average person associates the word lottery with prosperity and good fortune. As readers will find is the case in each of these stories, the concept of winning, especially winning something like a lottery or other contest left to chance, such as a horse race in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the old adage "winning isn't everything" rings absolutely true. Readers must get to the conclusion of each story to experience the full magnitude of the irony each author attempts and succeeds at in each respective story. In "The Lottery," Tessie gets her name drawn more than once, and by more than one person. Tessie definitely wins the lottery of the town, without a doubt. Her prize for her luck is to be stoned to death by the members of her town, presumably including by members of her family as well. Master Paul wins a great deal of money from the horse race and even gets the chance to gloat to his less than nurturing mother. The night of his win, this young man with his whole life ahead of him, dies over the course of the night. For these authors and their characters, winning is a relative term and often the cost of winning is higher than the reward received for the win.

Lawrence and Jackson do a fine job of distracting the readers by waiting as long as possible to deliver the punchline or climax to their short stories until literally, just a few lines before the very end of each story. Although the climax of the story is very much at the end, the reader can sense throughout the course of each story that something ominous lurks ahead in the text. Authors such as Jackson, Lawrence, and others such as Hemingway, Dahl, and Nabokov, have an uncanny ability to provide the reader with enough details to captivate the reader, but simultaneously leave out crucial details such that the reader is compelled to read the work all the way through to the end. Such is the case with "The Rocking-Horse Winner" and "The Lottery." "The Lottery" is almost immediately filled with nervous tension from the various characters, the setting, and the unclear circumstances under which the people of the town are gathering. The build of tension in "The Lottery" is at once quite slow, but at the same time is proportional to the advancement of the story. Meaning, the tension in the story may seem slow, which may be simply a trait of the lifestyle of the farm culture about which the story is focused. As the story progresses, the tension heightens proportionately, and as the end of the story approaches, the tension builds further so that the final moments of the story are at once the most intense and climatic, but because the story is over and the reader can infer that the narrative continues (i.e. Tessie gets stoned to death by the people in the town) even though the story is over and there is no further text, the final moments are also the denouement. Lawrence employs a similar structure in his story, only Lawrence's story contains a great deal more dialogue and less description than Jackson's story, which contains the opposite recipe: plenty of description and more sparsely place dialogue. Though the writers' methods vary, their works have similar agendas, goals, and outcomes.