Shirley Jackson is probably best known for her short story "The Lottery", first published in the June 26, 1984 edition of The New Yorker (Russo 1251). The story centers around a village on the day of their annual lottery. Its intention is to guarantee enough rain to have a good corn harvest the following June. The story revolves around a mistaken belief that if the villagers sacrifice one of their own, they will be compensated and have good harvests. In the short story “The Lottery,” Jackson applies three elements among many: theme, irony, and symbolism. In “The Lottery,” Jackson describes three main themes: scapegoating, tradition, and violence. In this town, scapegoating is used to banish the ills of society so that crops will prosper (Mazzeno 2457). Tessie Hutchinson, the woman who won the lottery, is the scapegoat for the year in which the lottery takes place, implying that the lottery is an annual event, which leads to the next theme, tradition. As Shirley Jackson wrote: “People had done it so many times that they only half-listened to the instructions; most of them were silent, wetting their lips, not looking around” (263). This suggests that the villagers memorized the directions through their participation in numerous lotteries. In "Short Stories for Students", Jackson also addresses the psychology behind mass cruelty by presenting a community whose citizens refuse to present themselves as individuals and oppose the lottery and who, instead, participate undoubtedly to the murder of an innocent and accepted member of their village. without apparent sorrow or remorse (142). The title of the story “The Lottery” is ironic. Reading the headline, the reader would assume that...... middle of paper ...... publication of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" in the New Yorker in June 1948. The scandal could have arisen at cause of the elements applied in the story: theme, irony and symbolism. In "The Lottery", Jackson suggests that anyone could murder an innocent person based on tradition for the welfare of a village as the theme of the story. The title of Jackson's story is a great use of irony because he conceives a completely different idea until he reads it. By setting "The Lottery" on June 27, a day near the summer solstice on which ancient rituals were performed, Jackson associates similarities with ancient rituals. The story's surprising ending and unflattering depiction of human nature must have been particularly disturbing to readers in the late 1940s, when Americans were particularly proud of the role they had played in defeating the Nazis during World War II (Du Bose 3341).