kson does not offer us much hope-they only talk of giving up the lottery in the north village....(107) The second work of Jackson that most literary critics comment on is her novel "We Have Always Lived in a Castle". Literary critic, Granville Hicks wrote that, "We Have Always Lived in a Castle" showed Jackson at her most skillful, making the not quite credible as real as this typewriter of mine. It also suggests, perhaps a little more ruefully than was customary with Miss Jackson, some desperate truths about mankind"(31). "Miss Jackson was certainly not the first writer to assert that there is evil in everybody, but what might be merely a platitude becomes a great truth because of the depth and consistency of her own feeling about life and because she was so extraordinarily successful in making her readers feel what she felt. She plunges the reader into a world of her creating and leaves him wondering about what he has always believed to be the real world"(32). Geoffrey Wolff points out that "the secret of her art in this novel is her 'comfort' in describing 'those things that happen'. The madness is so tangled with the ordinary that we cannot shrug it away or hide from it. The blatant symbols-poison, the garden, the collective will of the community, the inherited house cleaned by fire-are not things and ideas that stand for something other than themselves. Rather they are the life of the novel. In Freud's lexicon, the dream, or nightmare, is an allegory of hidden motives. In Miss Jackson's novel, the nightmare lives on the surface, so terrifying because it seems so ordinary."(18) Jackson's first novel, "The Road Through the Wall"(1948), "chronicles the collapse of a small community due to its own inner demonic contradictions. By focusing upon a whole neighborhood, rather than upon a single violated protagonist as in her other novels, the novel creates an effective metaphor or microcosm for the tensions inherent in the culture in the p...
