There are some things that stick in my head forever. Some of these are situations where I had a particularly grating interaction with one person or another, and remain irritated by their ignorance and insistence that they are correct.

One such situation occured in grade 11, where we read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and had a small in-class discussion. I imagine everybody has read this short story at some point, but for those who haven’t, it describes (SPOILER!) a small town where all the people get together on a certain day, draw lots, and then stone the winner to death. The End.

So, my memory centers around one question, where the teacher asked something along the lines of “when do you think the story was situated?” A student raised his hand and responded “I think it was set a long time ago, hundreds of years, and these are people following an ancient rite.” Whoah! thought I. I don’t think this is correct at all. The teacher nodded his head, though, confirming the student’s answer as being correct, and prepared to move on. I had to interject, though. I did, and said “Wait, I don’t think that’s correct. There really isn’t anything in the story to indicate any particular time period. The people live in houses, which could occur any time, and there aren’t really any means of transportation that could betray it being set in some time. I think it was left intentionally ambiguous, so that the story could be used to illustrate the risk of slipping towards barbarism, regardless of the era.”

This obviously annoyed the hell out of the teacher. He didn’t want a debate. He wanted to get through the questions. The other students were also annoyed. They didn’t want to listen to me blabbering. So I was dismissed offhand, and we continued.

I remembered this. And periodically I would wonder: was I wrong? Was “The Lottery” actually set in some specific bygone era? Am I an intellectual fraud who suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect? Or did I know what I was talking about?

Well, today I happened across a mention of The Lottery, and it linked to the wikipedia entry. Looking at wikipedia I found these quotes fom the author: “I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers [...]“, and “Jackson lived in Burlingame, California, and [...] reveals that she had Bennington in mind when she wrote “The Lottery”.”

So, not only did she set the story in the present, but she set it in a specific small California town! This isn’t quite the same as my theory that she wrote it to be non-specific to era (although I think there may be an element of that), but it is FAR from the teacher’s assertion that it was set in some ancient village.

So, now I can rest. My teacher was an idiot, I was right, and I deserve better than the B I received on that assignment.