In Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” and Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” the death of a character serves as a focal point of the story. In both stories, the author builds suspense around the death, slowly revealing the fate of the character. However, while both stories feature the death of a character, Jackson uses a backdrop of normalcy to counterpoint the horror of death while O’Brien uses a foreign environment against which death seems almost routine. Each author achieves the goal of engaging the reader in a compelling narrative but they use different narrative techniques to achieve that goal.
In his short story “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien slowly reveals information about a death of a character. Initially, the reader cannot even be sure that a character has died. For example, when reading the statement, “Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity” (O’Brien 113), the reader does not know with certainty whether Ted Lavender died as a result of being shot or if he lived. Throughout the story, there are references to Lavender’s having been shot. At the point that the reader realizes that Lavender did in fact die, the death is not really a surprise. By that point, one is not so much surprised that one character died as surprised that no more than one has died.
What seems unusual to the reader, though, is not the death of this character but the circumstances in which this group of characters operates. Beginning with the first paragraph of the story, the narrator emphasizes the multitude of items that each of the soldiers carries, describing those items in detail and noting their weights. The reader focuses attention on how much all those items weigh, and how difficult and uncomfortable it must be for the soldiers to carry them. The items themselves are both ordinary, such as chewing gum, and extraordinary, such as steel helmets that weigh five pounds each but provide some protection against bullets. Through the description of the items the soldiers carry, it becomes apparent that the soldiers are in a combat zone and their lives are frequently in danger. They need jungle boots and flak jackets for protection. As the story continues to its end, the reader cannot help but realize that the soldiers are not in an everyday situation but instead are functioning in the highly intense setting common to wars and combat.
One narrative technique O’Brien uses is repetition of extreme detail, especially of the details of the items the soldiers carry. There is so much detail, in fact, that when he occasionally embeds a sentence about the character’s death in the middle of this detail, it would be quite easy to overlook the mention of the character’s death. However, the fact of the character’s death gradually becomes more important and more prominent, serving as the reason for a major character’s feelings of guilt and subsequent changes in behavior. The reader is not expected to feel much sorrow, if any, about the death of the soldier; instead, the story aims to evoke sympathy for the lieutenant who feels guilty about his soldier’s death. The story uses death to focus on what effect death has on survivors.
In contrast, the characters in Jackson’s story “The Lottery” appear initially to be in such a normal environment it could be a stereotypical small village. To a modern reader, the village might not seem quite as normal because the men all seem to be farmers while the women all are housewives, but if one makes allowances for when it was written and the rural lifestyle, the setting seems quite ordinary. The children are interested in school and games; the men discuss weather and issues related to farming; the women gossip and keep their children out of trouble. Their lives seem to be the definition of boring and tedious, with no excitement or anything unusual happening.
Like O’Brien, Jackson drops hints early in the story about the culmination of events. For example, in the second paragraph of the story, there is this comment: “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones” (Jackson 133). However, Jackson cleverly embeds this sentence in a paragraph about what the children are doing to pass the time, so that it seems a harmless activity. The reader might easily conclude that the boys are collecting stones to use for skimming stones across a pond or something similarly harmless. In this bright, ordinary day there is zero expectation that something horrific will soon happen.
Jackson also uses humor to keep the reader from guessing too early exactly how macabre this particular lottery is. Some characters joke with one another and there is minimal tension exhibited by the village inhabitants. Her characters, unlike O’Brien’s, do not wear or carry protection against sudden violence. From the title’s use of the word “lottery,” the reader knows that a lottery is why the village has gathered, but the natural assumption is that a lottery is used to award a prize, something desirable. Even if the reader suspects this lottery might not have a reward to offer, the expectation would be that it might be a lottery to determine who must do something unpleasant such as provide a cow or pig for the village picnic. Until much closer to the end of the story, readers have no anticipation that the lottery determines who will be stoned to death by the rest of the village.
It is precisely this background of surface normalcy that makes the ending to “The Lottery” so intense. The villagers express no regret about what they will do; on the contrary, they criticize towns whose inhabitants have ceased holding a lottery. Unlike the lieutenant in O’Brien’s story, the survivors in Jackson’s story do not seem to experience survivor’s guilt. They have apparently been engaging in ritual sacrifice for as long as they can remember, and to them it seems completely normal. It is the reader who experiences horror and shock upon realizing that Mrs. Hutchinson, whose major character flaw is whining about the unfairness of things, is about to be killed by her neighbors with no more qualms than they would have if they were deciding which eggs to collect from the henhouse.
While the two stories share some surface similarities such as addressing death, their underlying themes about death diverge. O’Brien uses death to explore how the death of a fellow soldier can negatively affect the survivors, each of whom fears the same ending. Jackson, in contrast, uses death to explore the capacity for otherwise ordinary people to commit acts generally considered evil yet to still regard themselves as quite normal. O’Brien barrages the reader with detail to show how unusual the setting is for his characters, while Jackson uses a more sophisticated psychological buildup of ordinary events and people suddenly transforming into beings capable of casual murder. Both authors explore aspects of how humans react to death but differ in their evaluation of what those reactions are likely to be. Ironically, the soldiers exhibit more horror and grief about death than the villagers do.
Works Cited
Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery.” Literature and the Writing Process, Backpack Edition. Eds. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan Day, Robert Funk, and Linda Coleman. New York: Longman, 2011. 133-138. Print.
O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Literature and the Writing Process, Backpack Edition. Eds. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan Day, Robert Funk, and Linda Coleman. New York: Longman, 2011. 113-125. Print.
