Nick Klempan Week5 Question 3

Week 5 Question 3:

Discuss one of the critical entries that deals with “The Lottery”, explaining how/why it informed your understanding of the interpretation of the story.

To be completely honest, the first time I read through “The lottery” I was taken by surprise with the ending and had no idea why people would voluntarily subject themselves to this lottery. When I reviewed the story for a second time, I had to get my wife to read it – just so she could see it for her self. The only conclusion I could make about it was that it was not meant to be taken literally. Upon reading Nick Crawford’s piece, my suspicions were confirmed. Simply because something has always been done a certain way (tradition) does not mean that it has been done correctly, logically, or rationally. The point of the short story, in my opinion, is to get the reader to question the validity of tradition and to reexamine what is sociably acceptable and if it even should be. There was a time when racism was the norm, women couldn’t vote, and people could own other people as slaves. If tradition was never questioned, then, arguably, we would have never progressed – technology, or socially – as a civilization.