The Consequences Of Remaining Emotionless

1) "The Lottery" is one of many examples of a time and a place in which a group of people are "brainwashed" in to committing actions that they themselves would certainly not commit on their own. Normal people are introduced to the sheep effect. The sheep effect is when one person has a radical political or religious idea and all those that agree with the idea will begin to follow him like a teacher. It is the same situation that occurred when Russia was being introduced to communism by Lenin. He made small brochures of his ideas and eventually he had a following far greater in numbers than the opposition. This led to a revolution. In the same way the people in the story did not question the lottery because it had been around forever. The continued to randomly murder people annually because that was the tradition; a very harsh reality.



2) Elie Wiesel's speech perfectly dictates the theme of the story "The Lottery". Elie states that people will go along with anything that is not questioned over and over. The people in the story were presented with the lottery's questionable nature. Most people just dismissed it with little or no regard for the reliability of the questions that were being posed about the lottery.