lottery before they are quieted by Old Man Warner. (Koneke)” They are the two that still have the morals to know that what they are doing is wrong. These names all have a meaning that helps to tell the story. The names of the townspeople are used to give you insight to the true meaning of the lottery before its intentions are revealed.The items used in the story to hold the lottery are also significant in their own way. The box that the lottery papers are held in is an old worn black box. The box itself has two different meanings. It is an old box that is worn out from many years of use. Even so the lottery has been going on in this town for so long that this is not the original box, but rather a second box made from scraps left over from the first. The use of the pieces of the first box in the second and the fact that they will not trade the old box in for something new hints to us that they are very set in their ways and don’t want to break any significant part of the tradition. This box also represents a coffin. A coffin is a large box that holds a dead person. This box is a box that holds the name of a dead people. Unfortunately nobody knows whose name the box holds. The little slips of paper that they use for the lottery are all blank except one. That one slip of paper has a big black dot on it. We often think of black as the color of death. The black dot represents death. “Bill Hutchison went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office.(Arp 428)”The time period of this story is also very symbolic. The story takes place somewhere in the twentieth century. Armove tells us “Jackson let’s us know the time of the lottery at the outset of the story”(Armove). “Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and ...
