“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson focuses primarily on the customs associated with a small town. In the beginning the town gathers to hold the annual lottery. This is organized by “families and households, women are assigned to their husbands' families” (Oehlschlaeger). The lottery is conducted by Mr. Summers every year, he “[reads] the names – heads of families first – and the men come up and take a paper out of the box” (Jackson). The man who drew the black dot should then have every person in his family draw it again. Whoever drew the black dot this time would be stoned to death by the entire village. At first this story seems like a fairy tale; it seems that the lottery winner will receive some sort of jackpot. However, the person who is perceived as the winner is actually the loser. The theme of Jackson's story is that the social traditions practiced and accepted in this small town can have destructive consequences. This theme is developed by the symbolic objects and the evolution of the characters throughout the story. In “The Lottery” there are a number of different symbols that relate to the story's theme of acceptable social traditions having a destructive cost. Through these symbols you can see that rituals can have fatal effects on the city. All the symbols show that “tension is at the center of the story” (Schuab). One such symbol would be the town square where the villagers gather. The square could mean several things, the first of which is “organization and construction,” which is also mentioned as the “source of order” in the city (Schuab). “The people of the village gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock” (Jackson). This is where... in the center of the paper... two of them are very similar, and you can tell that this was Jackson's intention when writing the story. Tessie can also be representative of any woman or group of people who are treated as outcasts and feel unworthy because in "The Lottery", "being expelled from the group implies death" (Schuab). Throughout the entire story Shirley Jackson has done a great job. work to develop its theme through symbols and character identification. The characters' qualities, such as being round, flat, dynamic, and static, help the reader get a sense of how they take part in the traditions of this small town. The objects used as symbols also refer to the fact that the lottery was an enduring and accepted ritual that caused devastation in the city. Everyone has traditions that they are used to; However; they don't always end with a person being stoned to death.