Beginning of Essay
In “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson shows that times change and that people, sometimes, get trapped in tradition, forgetting to update their rituals to make them apply to their present lives. She uses Old Man Warner as a symbol of tradition that will not chang ....

Middle of Essay
.... comfortable with the way things were then. The “original paraphernalia” is stated to have been lost and replaced by the black box they used at the time before Old Man Warner was born. Even with a stickler over tradition around, the story plot shows that things would change with time. Mr. Summers used paper slips to draw instead of wood chips. His excuse for the change was the increase in population and lack of space in the black box for “all those wood chips.” Therefore, they did modernize part of the tradition; they just did not question the meaning and modernize it in the more significant areas. At one time, cutting out some of the ritua ....