" and she jokes back about leaving dishes in the sink. The whole town laughs. They must joke because someone they know will die very soon, and they have to cover their fear. This adds to the effectiveness of the story because we have all seen people act this way. The next aspect of human nature that the author looks at, and that adds to the effectiveness of the story, is denial. As soon as her husband has drawn the black dot, Mrs. Hutchinson begins to complain that her husband wasn't given enough time to choose. She was content to allow someone else to die, but when it was going to be someone in her family she began to complain about procedure. This is something almost everyone would do. Denial is typical of humans, and the author uses it to make the story more effective. The "crowd mentality" is another facet of human nature that we see in the story, and that adds to the potency of the story. In a crowd the stoning can be justified by each person present because they can tell themselves that they didn't kill Mrs. Hutchinson. They only threw one or two rocks. Everyone else killed her. This kind of phenomenon accounts for deaths in British soccer matches every year. People fall and are trampled to death by other human beings. Since we are familiar with this side of human nature, it's appearance adds to the effectiveness of the story. The story is made more effective because the victim in the story is one of the more developed characters. Mrs. Hutchinson and her husband are two of the people we meet early on in the story. We identify with them because most of the other 300 townsfolk are faceless to us. The story is too short to develop too many characters, so we identify with those characters that are more developed. She becomes like a friend to us, and then she dies. We empathize with her and her husband, and this adds to the effectiveness of the story. Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery is effective because it examines certain aspects ...
