Irony of The Lottery

Authors Note: The purpose of this is to show all of the ironic events in the story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson.

            There are over 100 major lotteries worldwide, but in this story, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, it is a different type of lottery. Usually in a lottery you would want to win, but the ironic thing about this is story is that you want to lose. If you win the lottery, you get stoned to death and if you lose you get to live another year. There are many more ironic events that occur throughout this story.

            For instance, another ironic event that happened in the story, “The Lottery” it seemed that the boys in the story were stacking rocks because they were just being kids and playing, but as pointed out at the end of the book, they were stacking rocks to throw at the unlucky winner of the lottery. Also an ironic event in “The Lottery” was the manners of the town. In society today, adults teach children to be nice and courteous to each other. In this village they are teaching kids to throw things at each other and teaching them that violence is okay. Along with manners of the village is that the wife’s husband didn’t even seem to care that his wife was going to die.

            In conclusion, there are so many twisted and wrong things with this village. There also are many ironic events such as stoning a woman to death to kids being taught to be violent. I don’t see how people could live like this, but that is why this is a book. These are just some of the ironic events that happen in the story “The Lottery”.

No More Wash Me

            I have been dirty for about 4 months now and people have written “Wash Me” on me about 13 times now. Do you know who I am? I am a window on the back of a Mercedes Benz. All the other windows on the car look nice and clean, but not me. I feel left out. What have I done to deserve this? All I want is some water and soap and I’ll be good as new. Is that too much to ask for?

            People constantly get into the car and drive off without even thinking about how I feel. They look through me, but can’t see how sad I am. They can’t figure out that I just want to be clean, like all the other windows on the car. One day some new guy got in the car and was driving me around. All the way I was getting more and more dirty and angrier by the minute. I started to get excited when along the way I show a car wash, but we just drove by. He stopped at the grocery store and picked up all his groceries and got back in. I saw the car wash on the way back, but didn’t think anything of it. Then there was a sudden squeal of the wheels and in two seconds we were in the car wash line. It was finally my turn and we went into the car wash. We came out and I was so happy I was finally clean. I am finally no longer dirty; people won’t write “Wash Me” on me anymore. Instead they won’t be able to write anything on me because I am to clean

About Perry

Authors Note: This is a character development piece on Perry from the book, Fallen Angels.

Everyone in the Army is somewhat brave, but Perry isn’t very brave. In the book, Fallen Angels, Perry entered the Army because he thought that he was a tough person. He meets many people and becomes really good friends with a person named Peewee. They are in the same squad and execute missions together. From the very first mission, Perry knew that this wasn’t what he was expected.

Perry is a nice man who entered the war in Vietnam. He learns that war takes a lot of toughness and determination. He also realizes that you must be very disciplined and alert all of the time. In this book, I consider Perry to be a dynamic character because in the start of the book he sounds brave and strong, but towards the end of the book you can tell that war scares him a lot.

In part of the book, Perry is ambushed by the enemies and doesn’t know what to do. He just fired at random, not seeing or knowing where the enemies stood. Then when he got orders from the sergeant that they were moving to the top of the hill to try to overwhelm the enemy, Perry was reluctant to do it because it put his life in danger. When they got to the top of the hill, they got the surprise of their lives. They were waiting for them. All around Perry there was bullets going past him. Then described in the book, Perry’s legs gave out and he got hit by 3 bullets. His actions of being scared and cowardly almost got him killed.

This reminds me of the movie Act of Valor because one of the side characters chickens out in the middle of a mission and instead of getting wounded, he got gunned downed and died. At the start of the book, Perry seemed like the main character in Act of Valor who would put his life in danger to save his fellow squads. Also the main character in Act of Valor jumped on a grenade and killed himself so that the people around him would survive the grenade.

In conclusion to this, I believe that Perry thought that war was easier than it really was. He thought that everyone could make it into the war and be good. I related Perry to the main character of Act of Valor because their characteristics seemed about the same. But that is what Perry sounded like in the beginning of the book, but towards the ending you can tell that Perry would be too scared to do the things the main character in Act of Valor did.