Four for Zach

1.  One of the first things I noticed while reading the short story version of "The Lottery" you mentioned in the question itself; it reads like a fairy tale.  This randomly brings to mind the novel "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut,  and as I recall, the original version was called "Slaughterhouse 5:  A Fairy Tale, but unlike the fairy tales we read, there is no moral at the end of the story, no real lesson being learned.  Instead, it is told by an objective third person who, in my mind, told the story with a matter-of-factness about it, and rather than going in depth to describe the town, people, or reason for actually conducting the lottery, Shirley Jackson chooses focuses on the event itself.  We have no idea where the setting actually is, but I find it interesting that they talk about neighboring towns conducting, or not conducting the lottery, unlike the film version where their own town is a special case.  It is clearly a patriarchal society in which the men are the ones doing the drawing and when one of the husbands is absent, they say to the perfectly capable woman that it's a shame she doesn't have a full grown man to draw for her, as if she somehow isn't capable of simply removing a slip of paper from an old box.  It's hard to tell at the end of the story, but it seems as if Mrs. Dunbar seems opposed to the stoning, choosing to stay behind the wild mob.  It seems as if women of the town aren't really favor of the lottery at all, complaining that time seems to go too fast and that it feels like the previous lottery wasn't long ago, where the men are in total favor, saying the towns who abandoned it were total fools, and saying that it would bring them more corn in their harvest.

6.  In the movie version of "The Lottery," self interest vs greater good is more self evident and realized because the main character is at an almost constant battle with the town of New Hope, and even his simple interest of placing his father's ashes next to his mother's grave is against the greater good for the townspeople.  The text version does a better job at analyzing the relationship between self interest and greater good though.  While Mrs. Hutchinson at the beginning of the story may not have been completely in agreement with the lottery, she, at the time, certainly wasn't opposed to it, and you can bet if another name had been chosen she could have been the one with the giant stone requiring two hands to hold.  As soon as her family was chosen, however, self interest kicked in, and she continually said it wasn't fair until the time she was stoned to death.  In the movie version, it was shameful to not meet the death with honor, and I think it would be interesting to be able to see a second lottery in the text to see if all whose names are chosen suddenly place their self over interest for the greater good of the society.