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What Is Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ Really ‘About’?
Jump into the conversation at my classic-short-stories club
It would be an exaggeration to say that “The Lottery” is a short story everybody has read but nobody understands. But it’s an exaggeration of a truth: A lot of us read the story in school and still feel confused by it.
What is “The Lottery” really “about”? Is it an allegory, a feminist parable, a commentary on Hitler or the atomic bomb, or something else altogether?
We’re talking about the varied interpretations this month in the classic-short-stories club I co-lead on Substack with Susan Lowell, the award-winning short story writer and author of Ganado Red and other books. Susan and I describe our reactions to “The Lottery”— and what Jackson herself said about it — in our first post about the story.
If you have thoughts, why not jump into the comments at “22 Ways of Looking at ‘The Lottery’ ”? It’s free — no need to subscribe — and you might gain a better sense of what’s going on in Jackson’s classic. We’re doing Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in June, and if you’d prefer to chat about Hemingway, you can jump in at this link.
