Life As a Lottery

A lottery is a scheme for allocating prizes by chance. The word is also used to describe a gambling game or a method of raising money, such as for public charity. People often think of life as a lottery: everything from the number of years you live to whether you’ll get a green card is decided by luck. But what does it mean to really look at life as a lottery?

Lottery draws on the familiarity of small-town American life to offer a cautionary tale about what happens when greed overtakes social ethics. In this story, Tessie is forced to choose between her morals and the convenience of a cash prize.

Tessie’s name is an allusion to Anne Hutchinson, the religious dissenter who was banished from Massachusetts for her Antinomian beliefs. Jackson suggests that there is a similar rebellion lurking within her character, even though she does not explicitly say so.

While there are many strategies for winning a lottery, the truth is that no one knows exactly what will happen. For example, selecting numbers that have not appeared in previous draws might seem like a good idea, but this does not improve your chances of winning. Instead, try to spread out your numbers across the entire pool—it’s much more likely that you will win if you play 10 lines in one draw than only 1 line. Also, don’t be tempted to pick numbers that have a sentimental value—others are likely to do this as well.