This paper compares Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," two short stories that examine society's tolerance of cruelty and suffering in service of tradition and communal prosperity. Both stories are set in small communities during annual celebrations, and both reveal that collective happiness is sustained by the deliberate victimization of an innocent. The paper analyzes how each author portrays her community's citizens, the atmosphere surrounding the ritual, and the symbolic weight of sacrificial tradition. It concludes that fear and resignation drive both communities to perpetuate injustice rather than confront the moral cost of their way of life.
Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas are both short stories that examine society's tolerance and apathy toward needless pain and cruelty in the name of superstition and tradition. Each story is set in a small village or town and centers on a yearly festive occasion. Le Guin'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 annual lottery. Despite their different settings and narrative styles, both stories arrive at the same disturbing conclusion: communities will sacrifice an innocent to preserve their own comfort and way of life.
Le Guin 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 smiles have become archaic" (Le Guin). 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" (Le Guin). The way Le Guin describes the citizens of her fictional town suggests that they have become jaded to both joy and pain, as though numbed by life itself. As Le Guin 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" (Le Guin).
Jackson, by contrast, describes the citizens of her unnamed village as rather ordinary — carrying on with their lives, their work, school, and household chores, as people anywhere might. She gives barely a hint that anything is amiss, nothing that would set this village apart from any other in any other time. Even as she begins to describe the lottery, its process, and its tradition, the citizens still seem dutiful and unremarkable. Jackson notes that in heavily populated towns the lottery might take two days, requiring an early start, but in this village of only three hundred people 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).
The first hint that something sinister may be at work in Jackson's story comes when the village boys make a "great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys" (Jackson). Yet Jackson quickly pivots to describing the village men gathering and "speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes," just as any group of neighbors might — except that they stood "away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed" (Jackson). "The women," Jackson writes, "greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon...the women began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly" (Jackson).
The community's investment in perpetuating the tradition is made explicit through an old man's reaction when someone mentions that neighboring towns have given up the lottery: he grumbles that it is "Nothing but trouble in that...Pack of young fools" (Jackson). The local saying — "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon" — captures the superstitious logic that sustains the ritual, linking communal violence to agricultural prosperity. This scapegoating mechanism is central to understanding both stories.
"Discovery of each story's central horror"
"Fear and resignation sustain unjust tradition"
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