“The Hunger Games” and “The Lottery”

 By: Ayoub Toumi

Instincts of a human being can be the thing between life and death. The two stories “The Lottery” and “The Hunger Games” have several things in common, such as fear, and natural instincts.

Both stories start with a very descriptive introduction. Shirley Jackson created a story where people draw a paper and the person who has the paper with a black dot on it is sacrificed as a tradition Suzanne Collins wrote a similar story but a person is chosen, one boy and one girl out of twelve districts. They then compete to death until there are two winners either from the same district or one lone survivor.

Fear. All the characters in both stories fear that they will be chosen. Also in the Hunger Games, Effie Trinket chooses who fights in the Hunger Games, but it is not only her choice. Katniss chooses to volunteer as tribute for the Hunger Games, because she knows her sister will die in the woods. Her choice determines the path her life would take. When she chose to volunteer, Katniss didn’t know if she would make it out alive. She took the risk though, because she didn’t want her sister to fight in the arena. In The Lottery, Tessie Hutchinson did not get to choose her fate. She didn’t get to decide whether she wanted to be the sacrifice or not. The decision was made for her when everyone drew the slip of paper out of the box. She did get to decide however, which slip of paper she got.

Both stories had several similarities in between them. They were based around relatively the same concept, but in different ways.