The Lottery (1948) Shirley Jackson

Once a year a small town draws a lottery to decide which one of its citizens should die. Causing a scandal when first published in the New Yorker 75 years ago, the ending of this story still has power to shock. Is not this shock due to our unconscious guilt regarding the many victims that underwrite our own cruel society? Freud claimed that the “civilized” human was charged with a sense of unconscious guilt because of the murder of the primal father in the long distant past. What Shirley Jackson’s heavily anthologized story suggests—and what Freud could not have known—is that this guilt is for the death of no ancient dad, but is rather on account of the most vulnerable among us who are being killed even now—in this story it is the garrulous housewife; “It’s not fair!” she cries; the town kills her with a kind of glee. Much of “civilization” remains discontent because the principle dream of the ad-world—beautiful persons in large vehicles racing through foreign landscapes: peak consumer happiness—is so blatant a lie. What is more disturbing is that the sums of money required to afford such a carefree lifestyle most certainly generate its own sadism—a theme that runs throughout Shirley Jackson’s clammy and venomous work. It is not that the privileged among us are happy and carefree because they do not know about the misery, terror and death that forms the basis of our society, rather they do know and this only increases their enjoyment.