Short Stories

Lectures
 Overview
• To identify ways in which the effect of the uncanny is achieved in short
stories.
• How do the short stories present the unimaginable?
• What is the effect of the omissions, revelations, and language usage in
the story?
o Genre: short story conventions (brevity and a plot twist)
o Linguistic
o Patterns
o Unsettling, Unfamiliar

The Uncanny
The uncanny, then, is an experience – even though this may have to do with the
unthinkable or unimaginable. It is not a theme which a writer uses or which a text
possesses. The uncanny is not something simply present like an object in a
painting. It is, rather, an effect. In this respect it has to do with how we read or
interpret (interestingly, it makes no difference here whether we are talking about
something in a book or something in the so-called outside world). In other words,
the uncanny has to do, most of all, with effects of reading, with the experience of
the reader. The uncanny is not so much in the text we are reading: rather, it is like
a foreign body within ourselves. (Bennett and Royle 39)
 Hamilton Reading
“The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty … it is a peculiar comingling of
the familiar and unfamiliar” (Royle)
• “the uncanny is an experience of doubling, one of ambivalence and
contradiction. It has to do with the shocking, even frightening, upset of
expectations.” (Amelia DeFalco)
• Linguistic patterns (Hamilton)
o Patterns of repetition, use of lists, contrasts of space (the eerie and
the fantastic)

’ .
• Initially published in 1902 (language and style)
• Classic ‘three wishes’ story
• Horror story
• Cautionary tale about greed and desires

Short Story Structure

Story and plot
➢ What happens?
➢ What does it mean?

Classic Short Story Structure

1. Exposition: introduction of characters and issue
i. The family of three (Mr and Mrs White, Herbert, Sergeant-Major
Morris, and the company representative
ii. Setting: without and within the home
iii. Sergeant-Major Morris
2. Rising Action
3. Climax
4. Falling action
5. Resolution/Denouement
 Exposition
Sergeant-Major Morris
• a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.
• At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family
circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he
squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and
doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.
• "Monkey's paw?" said Mrs. White curiously.
"Well, it's just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps," said the
Sergeant-Major off-handedly.
• His manners were so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their
light laughter had jarred somewhat.
• "Better let it burn," said the soldier solemnly.
• "Hold it up in your right hand, and wish aloud," said the Sergeant-Major, "But
I warn you of the consequences. “
• Her husband drew the talisman from his pocket, and all three bursts into
laughter as the Seargent-Major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught
him by the arm.

"If you must wish," he said gruffly, "Wish for something sensible.
“
• "A trifle," said he, colouring slightly, "He didn't want it, but I made him take
it. And he pressed me again to throw it away."

Setting
• The setting in literature refers to the time, place, and environment in which
a story occurs. Through its use, authors can establish mood, develop their
characters, and enhance the conflict.
• Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnum
villa the blinds were drawn, and the fire burned brightly. Father and son
 were at chess; the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving
radical chances, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils
that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting
placidly by the fire.
• In the brightness of the wintry sun next morning as it streamed over the
breakfast table he laughed at his fears. There was an air of prosaic
wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous
night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with
a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.
• In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried
their dead, and came back to the house steeped in shadows and silence.
It was all over so quickly that at first, they could hardly realize it, and
remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen -
something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to
bear.
• End of Part 1(wish has been made and the paw snaked)
o They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their
pipes. Outside, the wind was higher than ever, and the old man
started nervously at the sound of a door banging upstairs. A silence
unusual and depressing settled on all three, which lasted until the
old couple rose to retire for the rest of the night.
o He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces
in it. The last was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in
amazement. It got so vivid that, with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on
the table for a glass containing a little water to throw over it. His hand
grasped the monkey's paw, and with a little shiver he wiped his hand
on his coat and went up to bed.

Narration & Point of View

• Third person narrator/omniscient narrator
• Mr. White’s point of view
• Unconscious of his wife's shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his
hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.
(end of Part II)
• It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night,
stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness,
and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised
himself in bed and listened.
• The sounds of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his
eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild
cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

Lists
• He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to
the mantlepiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the
unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could
escape from the room seized up on him, and he caught his breath as he
found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat,
he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found
himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.
• He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure
of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had
burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating
shadows on the ceiling and walls, until with a flicker larger than the rest, it
expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of
the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute afterward the old woman
came silently and apathetically beside him.

• She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by
the arm, held her tightly.
• There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden
wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the
landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He
 heard the chain rattle back and the bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the
socket. Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting.

"The bolt," she cried loudly. "Come down. I can't reach it. “
• But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in
search of the paw. If only he could find it before the thing outside got in. A
perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard
the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the
door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the
same moment he found the monkey's paw, and frantically breathed his
third and last wish.

Resolution
The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the
house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind
rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery
from his wife gave him the courage to run down to her side, and then to the
gate beyond. The streetlamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and
deserted road.
 . . . ’

Overview
• Language
• Repetition
• Structure

The Uncanny Doubles

• The uncanny is “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something
long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud, 1–2). This doubleness– where
the unknown is co-existent with the known, where familiar becomes one
with unfamiliar, is where the crux of the uncanny lies, and which will appear
in the text through the ‘double’ figures. (Lara Agrawal)
• In ‘The Sandman’, the ‘double’ figure of Coppelius is echoed in both the
mythical Sandman figure and the character Coppola, haunting the story’s
protagonist Nathaniel throughout his life– a layered sense of the uncanny
formed through the splintering of the home and the self into the dual
home/un-home (Heimlich/unheimlich), as well as repression achieved
through the mode of narrativization, doubling perception into a turbulent
interaction of experience and the fantastic. (Lara Agrawal)
• In the eyes of young Nathaniel, the deference of the father and the misery
of the mother plays a part in this fragmentation of home into an uncanny,
unsafe, nebulous space, communicating the tormented state of the family,
achieving a disruption to the pleasantness and comfort of Heimlich, making
unpleasant and confusing, unheimlich, unclear and labyrinthine.
 • These instances that demonstrate Coppelius’ reign of terror communicate
to us the impact of his presence on the entire family, making the home a
place of secrets and intimidation, turning the familiar unfamiliar, introducing
the hidden to the home.
• Similarly, we see the ‘double’ figure of Olympia in ‘The Sandman,’ made
dual through Nathaniel’s eyes, highlighting the uncanny through the mode
of sight, as well as the overlap between Heimlich/unheimlich, as both
intimate and hidden. Nathaniel’s view of Olympia progresses from
discomfort to appreciation to obsession to horror, in the story.
• This spyglass acts as a literal lens of perception, figuratively
symbolising the state of Nathaniel’s fantastical narrativization– or the
fantasization of his phenomenological sight experience– made
concrete through this embodiment.
And seizing Klara with superhuman strength he tried to hurl her
from the tower” (Hoffmann, 245), proving the final reversal of known
and unknown, recognizable and unrecognizable, familiar and
unfamiliar, his self-becoming un-self.

Doubles
1. The Sandman and Coppelius
2. Coppelius and Guiseppe Coppola
3. Olympia

Structure
MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES
• The structure is destabilizing: three letters and a narrator we do not know
(unstable)
• Eye symbolism

TWISTS AND TURNS

• Reality and fantasy are impossible to separate for the protagonist: spooky
effect? Confusing?

Uncanny
• Uncertain identities and doubles
• Madness: it can be experienced by others as uncanny since it can feel
both ‘other’ and external, and at the same time relatable and internal.
• With its meandering structure, multiple perspectives, and themes of
doubles, reality, and terror, it is easy to see why Freud references The
Sandman in his essay ‘The Uncanny.’
• Both texts are unsettling, and question reality, truth, identity, and love:
themes that preoccupy us just as strongly today.
 -

The Political Uncanny

• This essay contextualizes the recent work of Nadine Gordimer, the
foremost white South African novelist, and in so doing suggests a general
framework in which to read contemporary literature from white South
Africa.
• South Africans of all races live in and against a pervasive, white-
authored, much-retitled fiction: apartheid.
• After showing what place white writing was supposed to fill in the apartheid
system as expounded by H. F. Verwoerd, I will argue that white authors
working against apartheid have turned to a mode of writing I call the political
uncanny. (Engel 101)

Masculinity & Uncanny doubles

• Masculinities are read through the lens of the double and the uncanny
as conceived by Freud and other scholars.
o The selected novels include The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991),
The Quarry (1995), The Good Doctor (2004), The Impostor (2008)
and In a Strange Room (2010).
• Issues such as masculinity in the military, friendship amongst men,
relationships with women, masculinity and apartheid, masculinity and
whiteness and heterosexuality and homosexuality are discussed and
explored through the lens of the double and the uncanny.
• Questions that emerge from this study are: What perspectives does
Galgut offer of masculinities before and after apartheid? How do the men
experience their political and social environment? How do the male
characters in the novels interact with the female characters? What
obligations do men and women have towards each other?

Transcultural hybridity
• During the past century, for a variety of reasons, more people have been
crossing national and cultural borders than ever before.
o This, along with constantly developing communication technology,
has seen to it that clear-cut distinctions, divisions and borders are no
longer as easily definable as they once were.
o This process, now commonly referred to as ‘globalisation,’ has led
to a rising trend of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural hybridity,’
terms often connected with celebratory views of our postmodern,
postcolonial world as a colourful melting pot of cultures.
• However, what these celebratory views conveniently avoid recognising, is
that the increasing occurrence of hybridity places a growing number of
people in a painful space in-between identities where they are “neither just
this/nor just that” (Dayal 47), “neither the One… nor the Other… but
something else besides” (Bhabha Commitment 41).
• Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes, Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss,
and Caryl Phillips’ a Distant Shore.
o These authors move away from an idealistic, celebratory view of
hybridity as the effortless blending of cultures to a somewhat
disenchanted approach to hybridity as a complex negotiation of split
subjectivity in an ever-fracturing world.
o All three novels lend themselves to a psychoanalytic reading, with
subjects who imagine themselves to be unitary, but end up having to
face their repressed fractured subjectivity in a moment of crisis.

Uncanny ethnicities
• The Griqua people of South Africa are recognised by the UNO as having
‘first nation’ status.
 o This article argues that, in the context of Griqua identity, the notion of
'first nation’ serves not to determine a prior and singular identity, but
rather to problematise the question of origins.
• Drawing on the concept of an uncanny splitting and doubling of identity, it
suggests that if the Griqua people constitute a ‘first nation,’ then to be first
is already to be marked by difference.
• From the point of view of the uncanny, identity commences not with a
singular origin but with division and displacement.
• Through its readings of works of South African travel writing and narrative
fiction, the article endeavours to show that Griqua identity, as a form of the
uncanny, is exemplary in exposing the constitutive ambiguities of identity
formation as such in the South African context.
• Bhabha refers to the uncanny as a ‘paradigmatic post-colonial experience’
characterized by a slippage between the realms of the private and public,
the psychic and the political (Citation1992, 141— 142).
• The analysis of Griqua identity incorporates this general sense of something
that is at once discontinuous and conjoined, disjunctive and interrelated,
but pays specific attention to the uncanny as a figure of splitting and
doubling, a trope connoting an origin that is not an original but a repetition.
• From the point of view of the uncanny, identity commences not with a
singular origin but with division and displacement.
o It is in this context of an uncanny origin that I should like, then, to
address the issue of Griqua identity.

Louvel
• Nadine Gordimer has often been hailed as a realist writer, even a social
realist one, but reading her novels and especially her short stories, one
cannot help but be struck by the presence, as if looming in the
background, of the uncanny.
o Persistent, unusual, even unheimlich situations or events reveal
another side of the writer’s art showing she could use all the tools a
writer has at her fingertips to reach her aim. (39)
• For Gordimer, the short story is the ideal form for writing about a
moment producing a close-up effect on a situation. (40)
• In the same essay, she develops her conception of the short story as a
brief illuminating moment she calls, returning to one of her favourite
images using insects, “the flash of fireflies.” She evokes “the quality of
human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out,
now here, now there, in darkness” and explains that “[s]hort story
writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one
can be sure of – the present moment” (180, emphasis added).
o …The short story therefore gives us quick glimpses of particular
moments, it triggers a sudden vision of a fugitive reality temporarily
anchored in the present of the event, and no more. (41)
• This striking image will allow me to argue that one of the means she resorts
to so as to convey the often elusive “ultimate reality” is the constant but
discreet presence of the visual in her work. It may directly figure like
photography (in “Jump” and in “Amnesty”), or indirectly, when the visual is
a means of translating reality into vision in a recurring description
(“Livingstone’s Companions”), or as a potent symbolical image verging on
the allegorical, the gruesome and the macabre (“Six Feet of the Country,”
The Conservationist) as we shall see. (41-42)
• One of the constant marvels of Gordimer’s texts and a salient stylistic
trait is the way she manages to bring to the European reader’s eyes the
very presence of such a far-off country, its landscape, and its people by
describing minutiae. (42)
o focussing on detail is part of Gordimer’s visual way of writing and the
hallucinatory way with which she tries to capture “the ultimate
reality,” verging on the unheimlich at times, as if magnified by a
microscope. (42)

Gordimer’s stories sometimes verge on the uncanny.

• Although anchored in a then contemporary time and place (although
they may not be accurately pinned down), her stories seem to be
suspended in a floating in-between allegorical world.
o In quite a number of Gordimer’s short stories the reader can identify
images signifying the return of the repressed pointing to strong harm
and shady dealings.
 o Regarding land spoliation, a potent image keeps haunting the short
stories as well as some of the novels: I will call this the “resurgence
of corpses.”
• The process of depriving a person of goods or services without having
followed due process is known as spoliation and is unlawful.

• The story, or rather novella, “Something Out There,” also illustrates the
theme of the return of the repressed and the uncanny haunting of white
people’s suburbs and conscience.
o The title itself pinpoints the undetermined although frighteningly
grotesque shape which has been spied by several people without
their being able to identify it: a Black man? An ape? A baboon?
• Gordimer is a master of irony, a device involving a kind of double
enunciation (or “exposure”) where two meanings (overt and covert) are
superimposed. (49)

• The narrator also manages, often ironically, to suggest discrepancies,

contradictions, unknown to the character him/herself but perceptible to the
reader.
• In “Six Feet of the Country” Graham Huggan spots a link or a kind of
mirror image, between Lerice, the unnamed “farmer’s” wife, and
Petrus, the boy whose brother is lying dead in the hut.
o She and Petrus both kept their eyes turned on me as I spoke, and,
oddly, for those moments they looked exactly alike, though it sounds
impossible: my wife, with her high, white forehead and her
attenuated Englishwoman’s body, and the poultry boy, with his bony
bare feet below khaki trousers tied at the knee with string and the
peculiar rankness of his nervous sweat coming from his skin. (79-80)

Gordimer, “Six Feet of the Country”

Opening: Character and narrator
• My wife and I are not real farmers – not even Lerice, really. … I, of course,
am only there in the evenings and at weekends. … The farm hasn’t
managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things,
unexpected, illogical.
 o Lerice, who I thought would retire there in Checkovian sadness for a
month or two, and then leave the place to the servants while she tried
yet again to get a part she wanted and become the actress she would
like to be, has sunk into the business of running the farm with all the
serious intensity with which she once imbued the shadows in a
playwright’s mind.
• Still, though I know we can’t afford it, and though the sweetish smell of
the fowls Lerice breeds sickens me, so that I avoid going past their runs,
the farm is beautiful in a way I had almost forgotten – especially on a
Sunday morning when I get up and go out into the paddock and see not
the palm trees and fishpond and imitation-stone bird bath of the
suburbs but white ducks on the dam, the lucerne field brilliant as
window-dresser’s grass, and the little, stocky, mean-eyed bull, lustful
but bored, having his face tenderly licked by one of his ladies.
• I had noticed that in Petrus’s presence in the kitchen, earlier, she had
had the air of being almost offended with him, almost hurt.
o In any case, I really haven’t the time or inclination any more to go into
everything in our life that I know Lerice, from those alarmed and
pressing eyes of hers, would like us to go into. She is the kind of
woman who doesn’t mind if she looks plain, or odd; I don’t suppose
she would even care if she knew how strange she looks when her
whole face is out of proportion with urgent uncertainty. I said, ‘Now
I’m the one who’ll have to do all the dirty work, I suppose.’ (73)

• The next morning before I went to town, Petrus asked to see. ‘Please, baas,’
he said, awkwardly, handing me a bundle of notes. They’re so seldom on
the giving rather than the receiving side, poor devils, they don’t really know
how to hand money to a white man. There it was, the twenty pounds, in
ones, and halves, some creased and folded until they were soft as dirty
rags, others smooth and faily new – Franz’s money, I suppose, and Albert’s,
and Dora the cook’s, and Jacob the gardener’s, and God knows who else’s
besides, from all the farms and small holdings round about. I took in
irritation more than in astonishment, really – irritation at the waste, the poor
everywhere, I thought, who stint themselves the decencies of life in order
to ensure themselves the decencies of death. So incomprehensible to
people like Lerice and me, who regard life as something to be spent
 extravagantly and, if we think about death at all, regard it as the final
bankruptcy. (76)

Ending
• The old man from Rhodesia was about Lerice’s father’s size, so she gave
him one of her father’s old suits, and he went back home rather better off,
for the winter, than he had come.
• Doubling: irony in the overt and covert meanings of a narrator that is not
aware of the superimposed double meanings in his utterances.
• Disconnect with Petrus’s world and to some extent, Lerice’s world.
• How does Gordimer represent this: the long run away/run-on sentences,
punctuation (commas and -). The farm setting too is apt to represent the
feudal rural existence quite different from the city’s transitional politics.

Gordimer, “What Were You Dreaming?”

• Alienation between the races: the blacks, the whites, they
• Knowing how to play the game:
o The man driving smiles over his shoulder and says something – I can’t
hear it very well, it’s the way he talks English. So anyway, I say what’s
alright to say, yes master, thank you master, I’m going to Warmbad.
… So, I tell them – A long time? Madam! And because they white, I tell
them about the blacks, ow when they stop, they ask you to pay. This
time I understand what the young man’s saying, he says, and most
whites don’t stop? And I’m careful what I say, I tell them about the
blacks, how too many people spoil it for us, they are robbing and
killing, you can’t blame white people. Then he asks where I’m from.
And she laughs and look round where I’m behind her. I see she know
I’m from the Cape, although she asks me. I tell her I’m from the Cape
Flats and she say she suppose I’m not born there, though, and she’s
right, I’m born in Wynberg, right there in Cape Town. So, she says, and
they moved you out? Then I catch on what kind of white she is; so, I
tell her, yes, the government kicked us out from our place, and she
say to the young man, you see?
• And then I begin to tell them lots of things, some things are real and some
things I just think of, things that are going to make them like me, maybe
they’ll take me all the way there to Pietersburg. …I tell them I’m six days on
the road. I not going to say I’m sick as well, I been home because I was sick
–because she’s not from overseas, I suss that, she knows that old story.
• And I tell them some more. They listening to me so nice and I’m talking,
talking. I talk about the government, because I hear she keep saying to him,
talking about this law and that law.

Focalisation: shift
• Coloured man, first person, linguistically distinct, Coloured English.
• Third person narrator, standard English, woman as focaliser.

• The Englishman glances over his shoulder as he drives. ‘Taking a nap.’ ‘I’m
sure it’s needed.”
o All through the trip he stops for everyone he sees at the roadside.
Some are not hitching at all, never expecting to be given a lift
anywhere, just walking in the heat outside with an empty plastic can
to be filled with water or paraffin or whatever it is they buy in some
country store, or standing at some point between departure and
destination, small children and bundles linked on either side, baby on
back.
• Some grin with pleasure and embarrass him by showing it the way they’ve
been taught is acceptable, invoking him as baas and master when they get
out and give thanks. But although he doesn’t know it, being too much
concerned with those names thrust into his hands like whips whose
purpose is repugnant to him, has nothing to do with him, she knows each
time that there is a moment of annealment in the air-conditioned hired
belonging to nobody – a moment like that on a no-man’s land bridge in
which an accord between warring countries is signed – when there is no
calling of names, and all belong in each other’s presence. He doesn’t feel it
because he has no wounds, neither has inflicted, nor will inflict any. (218)
• It comes from the driver’s seat with the voice (a real Englishman’s, from
overseas) of one who is hoping to hear something that will explain
everything. ‘What were you dreaming?’ … The sense is that if pressed, he
 will produce for them a dream he didn’t dream, a dream put together from
bloated images on billboards, discarded calendars picked up, scraps of
newspapers blown about – but they interrupt, they’re asking where he’d
like to get off.
• The light is red, anyway, and the car is in the lane nearest the kerb. Her thin,
speckled white arm with a skilled flexible hand, but no muscle with which
to carry a load of washing or lift a hoe, feels back to release the lock he is
fumbling at.

• She is the guide and mentor; she’s the one who knows the country. She’s
the one– she knows that too, who is accountable. She must be the first to
speak again. ‘At least if he’s hungry he’ll be able to buy a bun or something.
And the bars are closed on Sunday.’

• South African white woman, Coloured man, Englishman

• Woman translating the country for the Englishman, but he cannot ever
understand it.
o forced removals, resettlement, laws.
o Black and coloured cultures
▪ ‘How d’you think such a young man comes to be without front
teeth?’

• Beside him, she’s withdrawn as the other one, sleeping behind him. While
he turns his attention back to the road, she is looking at him secretly, as if
somewhere in his blue eyes registering the approaching road but fixed on
the black faces he is trying to read, somewhere in the lie of his inflamed
hand and arm that on their travels have been plunged in the sun as in in
boiling water, there is the place through which the work he needs to be
infected with can find a way into him, so that he may host it and become its
survivor, himself surviving through being on. Become like her. Complicity is
the only understanding. (220)
 The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Overview
• Plot structure and development.
• Setting
• Characterisation
• Symbols

“The Lottery”
• Examination of tradition and culture
• Abandoning of humanity for rules that might not have value for the present.
• Published in 1948, there was a huge outcry and death threats made;
apparently the Union of South Africa prohibited the story from being
read and circulated in the country.
o Is the story unsettling? Is it a horror story?
• Exposes aspects of human behaviour and character that is difficult to
accept.
• “The Lottery” might be disturbing, but not necessarily depressing, as
Jackson’s work tends to have humour too.
o Her work juxtaposes the horrific and the [petty] to reveal the cruelty
lurking beneath the veneer of everyday life.
• Regarding her famous short story, “The Lottery,” a tale of murderous rituals
carried out in small-town America which provoked an uproar upon its 1948
publication, she remarked, “I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient
 rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a
graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in
their own lives.”

Response to “The Lottery”

• In the summer of 1948, more than three hundred letters arrived at the
offices of The New Yorker in response to a short story, “the most mail the
magazine that ever received in response to a work of fiction” (Ruth Franklin,
“‘The Lottery’ Letters,” The New Yorker June 25, 2013).
• At a time when the post-World War II boom of the United States was about
to decline into the paranoia and conformity of the Cold War, the story in
question could not be more appropriate, nor terrifying for the American
imagination.
• Critics of the piece tended to fall within one of three categories:
confusion, derision, or old-fashioned misunderstanding.
• Many of the letters simply demanded to know what the story meant,
others took the story literally and wanted to know where these
“lotteries” were being held and wanted to know how they could
participate. (The New Yorker did not always clearly label its short
stories as “fiction” or “nonfiction” at this time.)
o Those who did manage to pick up on Jackson’s subtle themes tended
to respond with outright hostility, but these were fewer and far
between.
o At worst they threatened to cancel their subscriptions or hurled
nasty insults at Jackson.

Structure and Imagery

Opening
• The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of
a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely, and the grass
was richly green.
• The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post
office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many
 people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th.
but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the
whole lottery 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.

Depiction of a normal gathering

• The children assembled first, of course.
• Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other
boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest
stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix– the villagers
pronounced this name "Dellacroy"--eventually made a great pile of stones
in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other
boys.
• Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of
planting and rain, tractors, and taxes. … their jokes were quiet, and they
smiled rather than laughed.
• The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly
after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of
gossip as they went to join their husbands.

Symbolism
NAMES
• Mr. Summers,
o had time and energy to devote to civic activities.
o He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and
people were sorry for him, because he had no children, and his wife
was a scold.
• The postmaster, Mr. Graves
o Followed Mr Summers, carrying a three- legged stool, and the stool
was put in the centre of the square and Mr. Summers set the black
box down on it.
• The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the
black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old
Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born.

• Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no
one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black
box.
• As so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers
had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of
wood that had been used for generations.
o Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well
when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than
three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use
something that would fit more easily into the black box.
• The rest of the year, the box was put way, sometimes one place,
sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves's barn and another
year underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the
Martin grocery and left there.
• There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as
the official of the lottery; at one time, some people remembered, there had
been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a
perfunctory. tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some
people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he
said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the
people, but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been allowed
to lapse.

• There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had
had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box,
 but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only
for the official to speak to each person approaching.

Ominous setting in?

…and when Mr. Summers said, "Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?”
there was a hesitation before two men. Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter. came
forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the
papers inside it.
"Clean forgot what day it was," she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her,
and they both laughed softly. "Thought my old man was out back stacking wood,"
Mrs. Hutchinson went on. "And then I looked out the window and the kids were
gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running. “
Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting,
said cheerfully, "Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie.
“(foreshadowing)
"Well, now." Mr. Summers said soberly, "guess we better get started, get this over
with, so's we can go back to work. Anybody ain't here? “
The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions:
most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around.
"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said. "Nothing but trouble
in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."

Winning is losing.
• Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. "You didn't give him time
enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn't fair! “

• "Be a good sport, Tessie." Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, "All
of us took the same chance. Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.
• "There's Don and Eva," Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. "Make them take their
chance! “

• "Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr. Summers said
gently. "You know that as well as anyone else.”
"It wasn't fair," Tessie said.
• "It's not the way it used to be." Old Man Warner said clearly. "People ain't
the way they used to be. “(In response to Tessie’s objections)
• Nancy and Bill. Jr. opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and
laughed, turning around to the crowd, and holding their slips of paper above
their heads.

Macabre
• Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box,
they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had
made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing
scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so
large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar.
"Come on," she said. "Hurry up. “

• Mr. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for
breath, "I can't run at all. You’ll have to go ahead, and I'll catch up with you."
• The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson
few pebbles.