The Lottery

When I began to read the story I found it quite interesting that this village would come together, everyone from a house hold, to the town square for a lottery. At first I had thought that they were actually going to win a lottery. I thought that they would win money or something of value.

In the story they talked in detail about this wooden box that had been around along time. They also used wood chips to pick instead of paper. they started using paper because the village had gotten bigger and there wasn't enough room to use wood chips anymore.
When the story told of boys gathering together and finding rocks and putting them in a pile in the corner of the town square, I also didn't think much of it. I thought they were just boys and that they were playing a game or maybe going to throw little rocks at the girls. Boys will be boys.

In the story only the head of house hold could pick from the lottery box. Which it seemed that only the men of the house could pick a piece of paper and if the father couldn't pick then and older son had to before a woman could pick for her family. I found that kind of odd but also the story seemed to be set in early times were the head of house was in charge.

It wasn't till the end of the story that I realized that this wasn't a good lottery it was a lottery to see who would get stoned. I don't quite understand why they did that or why it was such a big event and the towns people would let it happen. In the story it had said that other villages had stopped doing the lottery. When I read the ending where I found out that who ever was the winner or looser I suppose would get stoned I understood why the other villages stopped giving a lottery. I still do not understand completely why this was happening. I wish there had been more detail about why they had this lottery and why they called it a lottery when really they didn't win any great prize.