Example Of The Good The Bad The Irony Book Review

On reading Shirley Jackson’s most renowned story “The Lottery,” the reader is left feeling somehow betrayed, because she does not offer her readers a world of black and white, where everything is straightforward. Quite the contrary, her world is a world of opposites merging into one confusing unity of meanings, where the good merges with the bad, resulting in an ironic portrayal of reality and what good actions can lead to. The world of “The Lottery” is a world of individuals who work together as a unity, erroneously believing that they are doing good for themselves and their community, while objectively perceived, their actions are far from good. They are in fact branded, and quite rightfully so, as bad and evil. Thus, in this perplexity of morals and “good” deeds, Shirley Jackson presented a world of ironic juxtaposition of good and bad.
The sad truth is that the villagers honestly believe what they are doing is the right way to go. Their flawed belief that their “good” and “right” actions will bring about fertility and happiness for their whole village seems overwhelming. Old Man Warner seems to believe that it is only their actions that are keeping them from regressing back to the dark ages and them becoming cave men. Thus, he urges the people on, though they do not need much urging at all, to believe like he does, that the lottery is what makes them a civilized society. The fact that the lottery is a mask for a ritual murder means little, if anything, to them. They honestly do not seem to perceive anything wrong with the way they conduct their deadly business of the lottery. They even go to such an extent that they do not rethink this practice of their not even at the cost of their own flesh and blood. It is absolutely astonishing how flawed some people’s judgment may be and how such flawed belief, in the wrong hands, can have devastating consequences to not only the individuals, but to the whole community.
Naturally, from an objective point of view, it is easily perceived that what the villagers are doing deserves no praise, though they themselves seem to believe so. Humans are generally prone to recognize their own actions as always right. It is like putting a mirror in front of one’s face, the person whose reflection it is, will never see the same person as another person looking at the first person’s reflection. It is a matter of subjective and objection perception. Jackson refuses to point any fingers at her villagers, choosing instead to simply portray their most deadly, yearly activity, and then allow the readers themselves to form judgments. At the very end of the story, when the whole agenda surfaces for what it really is, it becomes clear that even though the villagers are acting in the best interest of the whole community, they still participated in murder, in taking away of a life of their own family member, friend, neighbor. This fact chills the readers’ very bones, that such an “unintentional” evil actually exists and that Jackson does not allow us to view them as simply black and straightforwardly guilty.
Through a seemingly simplistic story and equally simplistic language, Jackson ingeniously portrays the double nature of the human existence. We are not clean slates to be painted all black or all white. It is always a mixture of both, resulting in thousands of shades of grey, where occasionally one side prevails. In this story, the villagers mistakenly believed in the “goodness” of their actions, while in fact they were blind to their own immoral and bloodthirsty ways. The fact that it does not offer a simplistic black and white world, where it is clear who the good guys and who the bad guys are, is personally, very appealing. The story has made me rethink my own actions, in a way that I myself sometimes am not too certain about them, about why I do the things I do, and what are the consequences of my own actions. Additionally, the fact that the temporal shift has been applied in such a way that the reader can never be certain of the exact time and place, also heightens the severity of the story’s closeness to reality.