Lottery" and "The Most Dangerous Game"

At first glance, the slow tension built up in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" seems to mark the story as wholly distinct from the over-the-top adventure in Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game," but closer examination reveals a number of points in which the two tales seem to engage in a shared discourse regarding the value of human life. "The Lottery" features an ostensibly civil society maintained through a brutal, retrograde ritual of collective murder, and "The Most Dangerous Game" chronicles the exploits of a retired general hunting his most recent (human) quarry. By examining the extent to which the characters in either story do or do not value human life and the implications this has for the larger society in which they live, one may understand the way in which all forms of governance, whether aristocratic or egalitarian, authoritarian or democratic, ultimately rely on...
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