"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD!
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is one of those stories that American kids read in high school. It’s part of a literary tradition, up there with The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby, classics that are assigned year after year, sometimes without a lot of thought into whether the texts will actually connect with today’s modern teenager. (It’s just the way we’ve always done things, you know? Why change what’s clearly working?)
Slight sarcasm aside, reading this story as a 39-year-old woman, I found myself thinking about the sunk cost fallacy. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “the idea that a company or organization is more likely to continue with a project if they have already invested a lot of money, time, or effort in it, even when continuing is not the best thing to do.” The townspeople in Jackson’s story are only just beginning to question their lottery, but the older residents are adamant about its importance to the community. If they were honest with themselves, they might say the reason they have to go on brutally murdering their unlucky annual winner is because if they stop, they must admit they shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place. And what do you do with that much blood on your hands? Who could be brave enough to say no more, enough is enough?
When I read this story as a kid, I didn't see the ending coming. Even now, there are few last lines that terrify more than the phrase, "and then they were upon her." But I noticed something new this time, something that chilled me to my core. The line that stopped me in my tracks was, "the children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles." The image is grotesque: a young child aiding in his mother's demise. But that's not what scared me. It was every single reasonable adult who watched what happened, who raised their children to gather rocks, who passed down the story of the lottery and its perceived importance to their wide-eyed offspring. Children might do something wrong, but they don't always know what they're doing.
The adults knew. Deep down, they always knew.
And still, they threw their stones.
