Academic Writing · Harvard EXPO 15
Bureaucracy, Compliance and Statistical Improbability in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"
A literary analysis arguing that the village lottery in Jackson's story is not random at all — supported by a Monte Carlo simulation of the village.
About this paper
Written as the final analytical essay for EXPO 15: Fundamentals of Academic Writing at Harvard, this paper reads Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948) against the grain of its usual interpretation. Rather than treating the story as a parable of blind tradition, the essay argues that the village’s lottery is best understood as an instrument of state control — legitimized through bureaucracy, procedure, and the optical illusion of randomness — and that its administrative arrangement concentrates unaccountable power in the hands of the officials who run it. The argument is developed through three analytical frameworks: social (the bureaucratic structure of the ritual), psychological (causality, influence, and compliance), and statistical.
The statistical framework is the paper’s distinctive contribution: a Monte Carlo simulation of the village as an agent-based model, run over decades of simulated draws under competing scenarios (a fair lottery, exemptions for officials and founding families, targeting of newcomers). The simulations quantify how improbable the story’s implied outcomes would be under genuinely impartial selection, lending computational weight to a claim built from close reading.
Excerpt
This essay argues that “The Lottery” — this village’s lottery — is not as random as it seems or once might have been. Instead, it is now manipulated by the village elites to protect themselves from selection while preserving the authority that enables this protection.
Full paper
The complete essay is available as a PDF.