The famous civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “The final tragedy is not oppression and cruelty by bad people, but silence on this from good people.” people", perfectly capturing the main message of the short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, due to the themes of peer pressure and tradition present throughout the story. In this story, the inhabitants of a small village come together for their annual tradition, a lottery, in which a person is chosen at random from a box containing the names of each of the villagers. The village, which has no specific name, at first resembles any other historical village, with women gossiping, men talking and children playing, but it soon takes a sinister turn when it is revealed that the "winner" of the lottery is not a real winner at all; he or she is stoned to death by everyone else in the village purpose is not mentioned directly in the text and the reader may wonder what message the story is trying to convey; instead, the lottery is intended as a thin veil...