The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

This is a protection for the participation as a whole, and the individual(a) is expected to sacrifice for the group. much(prenominal) an expectation is often evokeed by a group, still the question is why does the individual conform. In this case, the act of conform places the individual in a position where he or she business leader become the scapegoat, or he or she might have to participate in the attack on the scapegoat. The last mentioned case has been analyzed by a series of experiments cognize as the Milgram experiments, which were just as shocking when first released as was "The Lottery."

In the 1970s, Dr. Stanley Milgram, Professor of Psychology at the Graduate eye of the City University of New York, published the results of a series of experiments on the tendency of subjects to accede to authority eve to the point of acting acts which they themselves considered unethical or im honourable. The issue raised by Stanley Milgram and examined by him in his research is the disjunction among an individual's personal moral sense and his or her actions when performed under someone else's orders. The dichotomy is between conscience and authority, and Milgram says it is found in the very nature of society. single the individual who lives in a remote area solely alone escapes the role of tender authority completely and bed act only harmonise to his

Milgram states at the outset his view of the roles of obedience and discipline in society:

or her conscience without pressure to do otherwise. The individual in a social setting who acts only according to his or her conscience pull up stakes around veritablely do so in a context of pressure and still coercion to act otherwise on certain occasions. some societies employ their strictures more directly and strenuously than do others, but all societies in some degree try to enforce conformity on members, at least in certain areas of conduct.

Thus these experiments have much to say about the social order, how it is achieved and maintained, and what this might mean to anyone concerned about the morality of regimen actions with or without the acquiescence of the people.

Shirley Jackson has tapped into the same issues in a dramatic fashion in "The Lottery." Her characters have lived under the menace of the drawing for many years--it is stated that the "original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago" (Jackson 408). Milgram only tested the reactions of those told to scud other people, but Jackson explores the willingness of people to live in a situation where they might themselves become the object of bedevilment just as easily as they could be the torturer. For the most part, the people of the village treat this day as an pleasure trip and seem not to have trepidations about the way it will end, though the reader knows that there is some tension in the village because a few of the people do express doubts. While the reader might believe that the lottery involves a prize of some sort, as would be the case with drawings at picnics in the real world, this is not the
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