The works of Shirley Jackson tend to the macabre because she typically unveils the hidden side of human nature in her short stories and novels. She typically explores the darker side of human nature. Her themes are wide-ranging and border on the surreal though they usually portray everyday, ordinary people. Her endings are often not a resolution but rather a question pertaining to society and individuality that the reader must ask himself or herself. Jackson’s normal characters often are in possession of an abnormal psyche. Children are portrayed as blank slates ready to learn the ways of the world from society. However, adults have a hidden side already formed and lurking beneath the perceived normality of the established social order. We see this best in Jackson’s most famous short story, The Lottery. Jackson’s uses many elements of fiction to demonstrate how human nature can become desensitized to the point of mob murder of a member of their own community. One of the ways she does this is through character. While the shocking reason behind the lottery and the gruesome prize for its winner are not received until the ending, the characters come back to haunt us for their desensitized behavior earlier in the story. For example, the children in the beginning of the story innocently gather stones as normal children might, yet their relish in doing so becomes macabre once we find out the purpose for which that are collecting them “Bobby Martin hard already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroy…eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys,” (Jackson 2).
The setting in which these townspeople go about organizing their deadly lottery is very official and it seems as if Jackson is suggesting that the autocratic natur...