"The Lottery" and Battle Royale

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” manages to spread its influence far beyond what a short 9 page story would suggest.  The calm atmosphere it creates and the chilling revelation within the last few paragraphs can be seen paralleled in many other literary works.  When I read the story, the concept of friends and family turning against each other due to the insistence of time-honored tradition, I was strongly reminded of the Japanese book Battle Royale.  I believe these two stories share enough in common to be compared, and have enough differences to offer a unique look at one another.

Battle Royale is, in a nutshell, the OG version of The Hunger Games.  In it, Japan has succumbed to an authoritarian government which ruthlessly controls everyday life in order to maintain power.  With the aim of maintaining citizen complacency and subdue any sort of organized revolt, the government terrorizes the populace by holding “The Program”.  Every year, a junior high school class is kidnapped and isolated from the population.  Our protagonists are taken to an island, given provisions, maps, a collar which will detonate a bomb if they attempt to escape, and most importantly: weapons.  The children are instructed that they must kill each other, and the last person alive “wins” and receives a government pension.  As the game begins, the death tolls quickly mount, with some students very eager to participate and ruthlessly kill others.

Obviously, these two stories share one integral plot device in common: the betrayal of friends/subversion of any sense of community through the ritualized murder of others.  In both situations, people who ordinarily would be friendly to another are willing to accept a foreign authority (the government in Battle Royale, the imposing presence of tradition in “The Lottery”) which demands that they hurt one another.  However, while this action is given a specific cause in Battle Royale (to scare the public into remaining content), “The Lottery” is not so clear about why the ritual takes place.  Although one character briefly mentions that the sacrificial stoning may offer a good harvest for their small town, it seems that the villagers simple commit the atrocity because they already have been or so long, and they fear the change that would be brought by ceasing the action.  Despite the talk of other villages banning the lottery, the townspeople would rather continue with the murder of others in order to maintain whatever peace they already have.

When I read these stories, they always leave me with the same feeling: what would I do in that situation? What if my 8^th grade class was kidnapped and forced to fight to the death?  What if I grew up in an isolated town that chose one person a year to die by the hands of the entire community?  I believe it is this sense of realness, the ease of which I can insert myself in the plot of these stories, which gives them their real staying power.  It challenges my preconception of myself: I am truly unsure whether I would break down and cry or let emotions fall aside and join in the killing if I was a character in either work.  By making the reader think about his actions and just what it would take to break bonds with those closest to us, these stories challenge ourselves.

 “The Lottery” asks the reader to identify why we let pointless violence stay in our lives, why we something hold us back when it does nothing but frighten and worry us.  Due to the fact that it is merely a short story, when I compare it to Battle Royale I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if “The Lottery” was longer, with a more developed ending.  Battle Royale ends on a relatively happy note, in which the main characters manage to break away from the violence and oppression they know and choose to search for a new life.  It makes me think of what it would take for the tradition of the lottery to be removed from the town, or at least whether any characters would be inspired to escape the town and distance themselves from the violence.  Although this is pure speculation, it is the stories that make me think about what didn’t happen as much as I think about what did happen which truly stay with me.