"The Lottery" and "The Possibility of Evil" by Shirley Jackson, share the same theme of evil. In "The Possibility of Evil" Miss. Strangeworth has this idea that she should keep evil out of her town, so she writes letters, without signing her name on them, to the members of her town; warning them about different things or saying harsh phrases that turn people pale. She believes it's the right thing to do and that it's her town, since there wouldn't be a town without her grandfather, and she also believes it's her duty to alert the members of the town about the "evil" things happening around them and affecting their lives. In "The Lottery" has a sense of evil, but in a different way, the lottery is suppose to fun and you end up winning something amazing, like money; but instead this lottery if you win it you get stoned to death. The villagers think that this ritual or tradition is something they should be proud of and can't get rid of it, unlike the other villages that did. In fact, they say getting rid of the ritual is bad and that they will end up living in caves or be even more poor.
Mrs. Huncthson ends up getting the lottery ticket after saying it wasn't fair when her husband drew the ticket first. She keeps screaming it wasn't fair even when getting stoned to death not other by her friends and other villagers, but by her family as well. In both these stories the possibility of evil is lingering around these characters. First, you have an old lady writing harsh letters to people and then you have a village doing this ritual of stoning a person to death. Both these stories hold evil in them, even though they are shown in different ways, and the stories both end up with an unhappy ending.
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