The Lottery

I denne study guide kan du få hjælp til at analysere novellen "The Lottery" af Shirley Jackson, som findes i lærebogen Wider Contexts, s. 25-32. Udover analysehjælpen kan du finde et summary af teksten samt idéer til fortolkning og perspektivering.

Præsentation af teksten

Titel: “The Lottery” (1948)
Forfatter: Shirley Hardie Jackson
Genre: Short story

Shirley Jackson (1919-1965) var en amerikansk forfatter, som især blev kendt for sine værker indenfor horrorgenren. Mange betragter hendes roman The Haunting of Hill House (1959) som en af de største horrorklassikere i moderne tid.

Jacksons novelle "The Lottery" udkom første gang i tidsskriftet The New Yorker. Novellens kontroversielle indhold mødte voldsomme reaktioner hos samtidens læsere, og både redaktionen på The New Yorker og Shirley Jackson selv modtog et stort antal hadebreve i den forbindelse. I dag er "The Lottery" dog en meget berømt novelle, rost for sin brutale skildring af den menneskelige naturs mørke sider.

Uddrag

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Title

The title of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is deliberately misleading, as most readers would expect winning a lottery to be a good thing, and thus might expect an uplifting story of fortune and success. The title is also somewhat vague and mysterious, as it does not reveal anything about the specific kind of lottery that the story will focus on, and thus sparks curiosity among readers.

However, the irony of the title swiftly becomes clear as the story progresses, and we get more and more hints that the particular village lottery that the story revolves around is not a contest one would want to win. At the end of the story, all doubt is gone, as it is revealed that the 'winner' is to be stoned to death by the other villagers (p. 32, ll. 18-36) as part of an obscure and brutal tradition whose exact origins are unclear to the villagers themselves.