The Stories: The Lottery and The Most Dangerous Game - Essay Example

In both stories, the central characters, like Tessie Hutchinson in “Lottery”, Rainsford and General Zarrof in “the Most Dangerous Game” are sportively desirous to inflict pains and deaths on their victims. These characters cannot realize what the victims feel until they themselves become trapped in their own actions. Also, both Jackson and Connell propound that the gap between the victims and the victimizers remains unfathomable since the victimizers ultimately remain triumphant and the victims remain unheard and subsequently are put to death.

Both Jackson and Connell significantly have depicted the distance between the victimizer and the victimized in their stories. The victimizer or the hunter will never feel victimized or the hunted. Even if they find themselves in their victims’ position, they will remain unheard. Jackson’s protagonist Mrs. Hutchinson arrives at the celebration of the lottery festival late, but in a dutiful as well as playful manner, seeking others’ excuse as follows: “Clean forgot what day it was…Thought my old man was out back stacking wood….and then I looked out the window and the kids were gone, and then I remembered it” (Jackson) In the conversation with Mrs. Delacroix, she acknowledges that this it is “the twenty-seventh celebration” of the lottery festival which is indeed a lynching game. Therefore, she has already observed and celebrated twenty-six deaths of others. So far she has acted as a part of her community, the collective victimizer that celebrates its members’ death. But this time, she herself is going to be the victim. She as well as her objection to the unfairness of the ritual will remain unheard, as she herself has not paid heed to other victims.

Connell also portrays this distance between the victimizer and the victimized. For Rainsford and General, Zarrof hunting is “The best sport in the world” (Connell). When Whitney comments that hunting is a sport only “for the hunter, not for the jaguar,” Rainsford objects, “Who cares how a jaguar feels?” (Connell) This refusal of Rainsford that the jaguars or the hunted have understanding and “The fear of pain and the fear of death” is almost ironic, since he himself becomes terrified and appalled at Zarrof’s man-hunting game. Indeed Zarrof is Rainsford’s own mirror image. Before being Rainsford’s victim, Zarrof wishes to play with him, since man-hunting is his favorite game. Forced by Zarrof he participates in his man-hunting game and eventually becomes triumphant over Zarrof. Still, he fails to understand a victim’s fear for life and kills Zarrof. Even nearing death Rainsford’s failure to perceive his victim’s death, ultimately turns him into a beast. Indeed he figuratively admits near the end of the story: “I am still a beast at bay” (Connel).

Rainsford’s self-acknowledgment of his beast-like image obviously refers to the dark savagery that dwells in modern man’s heart. This existential savagery of human beings is also evident in “the Lottery”. Referring to the collective savagery, Amy Griffin says, “[Jackson] wanted to dramatize graphically the "pointless violence" in people's lives…to reveal the general inhumanity of man. Jung's view is that even "more or less civilized" people remain inwardly primitive” (1). The hypocrisy and the savagery in human society revealed through Shirley’s and Connel’s crafty use of irony appear to draw these pains and suffering upon themselves because in some way or other some of them are doomed to undergo the horror of being stoned. Both of the authors employ this literary tool of irony to reveal the underlying savagery and hypocrisy of human nature. Indeed the ironies in the stories are so frivolous and absurd that towards the end of the story, the readers become horrified with the narrator’s jolly portrayal of such an atrocious event like “lottery” that gives people the chance to die with the joyous and happy consent of their acquaintances.