Imagine living a life without any type of tradition, no birthdays, no holidays, no anniversaries and no expectations for anything. Everyone has tradition in their life, whether it be good or bad, important or unnecessary, every one celebrates some sort of tradition. In the short story “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson shows us how some people blindly follow tradition just simply because it's tradition. Shirley expresses how extreme people can go to practice tradition or how blindly they can be followed and uses characterization and symbolism to prove it.

Shirley uses characterization in her short story to convey her theme of blindly followed tradition. One character she uses for this is old man warner, which is the oldest man in the town and therefore has dealt with most lotteries. While everyone is gathering together he says . “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery”(Warner 33). When old man warner says …show more content…
She uses the calmness and contentedness of the villagers to symbolize how okay they are with this tradition. When mrs hutcherson first got to the gathering she says to mrs delacroix: "Clean forgot what day it was...I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty seventh and came a-running"(hutcherson 8). This shows that some of the villagers are so use to the lottery and so content with it they don't even really think about it, when in reality it is a terrible thing! Another thing that the narrator states is that “The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions: most of them were quiet”(Narrator 19). This is another symbolization that the lottery is such a normal thing people don't even pay attention to it. There were many ways shirley symbolized things in her story to convey her theme of blindly followed