The Use of Inhumanity in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson we discover that she drew the black dot, the city turned against her and became deaf to her cries (Jackson, 1948, Kennedy and Gioia, 2016, 238 and 243). This illustrates Jackson's message that there is an undeniable underlying violence in people that can be amplified by tradition. City dwellers were so caught up in the way they had been doing things for decades, even centuries, that they didn't stop to think about what exactly they were.

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