The Hazzards of being Apathetic

The ending of the the story "The Lottery" was shocking for most readers. Unlike most stories or movies, The Lottery ended with a horrible twist for one of the main characters. An example of an ironic type of ending such as the one in The Lottery has to be most of Stephen Kings novels, where there is an uneasy twist at the end of the story, mostly unexpected by the readers. To be specific, his book The Fog ends with the main character and 4 other characters in a car, escaping the fog full of monsters. He ends up with a gun with 4 bullets, and shoots the other 4 to end their lives quickly. So, when he goes out of his car, asking for death, the fog clears and the army rescues him. This was quite a shock for the viewers of this movie.

Elie Wiesel's speech has a few relations to the story The Lottery. In his speech, he talks about how peoples apathy towards what was happening in Germany was torment enough, let alone what the Nazis were doing. In The Lottery, the city folk are apathetic about how they are going to kill one of their own town folk, for stupid reasons like a chance at good crops, or sunnier days, or whatever they were stoning her for. Both stories show great examples of irony in them. In the speech, Elie explains about how the USA, trying to liberate the people in the concentration camps, were still doing trades with Germany until 1942, which without these trades, the concentration camps could not have conducted their slavery. In The Lottery, its ironic how the children of the city gather up stones when it could indeed be them who are the ones soon to be hit by these stones. In conclusion, there are similarities in the fictional story and the very real speech.