The story’s essential open-endedness, of course, is one of the reasons that it has become so famous. She has chosen a nameless little village to show, in microcosm, how the forces of belligerence, persecution, and vindictiveness are, in mankind, endless and traditional and that their targets are chosen without reason.” The standard response that The New Yorker‘s Kip Orr sent to letter-writers was only slightly less vague: “Miss Jackson’s story can be interpreted in half a dozen different ways. There are many ways to read “The Lottery.” Jackson herself famously refused to give her editors at The New Yorker an explanation for the text, even when the story received record letters and phone calls, many from readers horrified and desperate to understand the story’s meaning. But unfortunately, the comparison doesn’t stop at the weather. “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” So begins the most famous and widely anthologized of Shirley Jackson’s short stories, “The Lottery.” (the story’s date was chosen to correspond with its 1948 publication in The New Yorker). That June 27th sounds rather like this June 27th (full-summer, profuse blossoming, etc.) at least from where I’m sitting.
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