Take this article with a bit of salt--this is a shorter review for a shorter piece of work. Not that short can't be profound, per se, but it does lend itself to length depending on how tired the author feels. Square the whole thing by a pot of coffe and you've got yourself something... not as lengthy. Or as mind-blowing-ly insightful/intrinsic. Small and compact, unlike this introduction. Let's get this review on the road, or at least out of the driveway.
I’ve actually had the privilege of seeing this piece performed on stage. Granted, it was high school play, and I got to skip algebra to see it. Imagine my unfocused attitude as I half-watched-half-wrote-my-own-story, with the ending resulting in slightly raised eyebrows on my behalf.
“Not a bad story for high schoolers sitting in an hour-long theatre class,” I thought. I didn’t realise that it was a highly celebrated short story from the year 1948. “Almost like The Purge,” I thought.
That’s what it is--revolutionary for it’s time. The assumptions we as a reader are supposed to make- -the idea that it’s set in rural America post WW2- are the assumptions that come naturally to the target audience- rural Americans picking up literature for possibly the first time in their lives. While The Lottery did pave way for many complex and intrinsic pieces of literature, it in itself is not that interesting. The twist was easily identifiable, or at the very least you can say, “Something’s going to happen, and someone’s going to die.” Even the title puts the intrigue out of the story the way it’s talked about. When an idea is pussyfooted around, an idea and name such as The Lottery, it’s easy to guess what’s going to eventually go down.
We want to see all of the f**ked up things people choose to do when mob mentality comes into play. However, the imagery of a stoning isn’t all that exiting to describe, nor all that plesant. Thinking back to a work like The Penal Colony, We’re shown our smoking gun right from the get go, and we get to see what horrifying thing it does before the end. There could be an argument on the nature of devices (torture machine vs rocks) but it’s still a way of ‘punishing’ the masses, innocent or guilty.
I can't say that I have any strong feelings for The Lottery, one way or the other. It's had no lasting impact on me other than the thought of, "This seems like a lot of people had to read this in high school." Like I see the puropse in reading it, but other than the lesson it teaches there's just no re-readability for me.
4.5/10 too many rocks
