Please answer each of the following questions with a detail from the story. Using Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” please answer the following: 1. What makes this story dystopian? How is this world different from our own? How is it similar? 2. What is the type of dystopia in this story: ecological, economic, political, spiritual, or science/technology? Explain. 3. How are people in the story different from us? How are people in the story similar to us? 4. How do politics shape the lives and personalities of people in this dystopian story? Using Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The One Who Walk Away from Omelas,” please answer the following: 1. What makes this story dystopian? How is this world different from our own? How is it similar? 2. What type of dystopia is this story: ecological, economic, political, spiritual, or science/technology? Explain. 3. How are relationships between people strengthened and/or weakened by this dystopian society? 4. How do politics and technology shape the lives and personalities of people in this dystopian story?

1. Jackson's "The Lottery" is dystopian because it depicts a village that tries to ensure a good harvest by annually stoning one member of the community to death. We learn that this practice occurs in other towns in the area because Mr. Adams mentions a village talking about giving up its lottery.
2. Except for the lottery, this world seems very similar to our own small, close-knit, rural communities in the United States. Because Jackson wrote the story in 1948, it more closely depicts that period in history.
3. This is a spiritual dystopia because people have allowed a cruel superstition to replace reason and compassion. The villagers have elevated a barbaric and outdated custom into a sacred ritual that they are frightened to change.
4. I would say the people in this story are very similar to us. We often, for example, treat our economic system as sacred, and when it grinds certain people up, we tend to blame the victim—unless, as in the case of Tessie Hutchinson, we become the victim. Then, like her, we protest that the system is unfair. It is human nature to view a system differently depending on whether you benefit from it or suffer under it. One could argue that we do not have any more of a "need" for a few people to suffer cruelty at the hands of our economic system than the villagers "need" a human sacrifice for a good harvest.
The politics of this culture desensitize people to its cruelty. One of the saddest parts of the story is that children attend the ritual and eagerly gather rocks for the stoning:

Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones.

The children learn that it is normal and morally acceptable to kill one of your own. The ritual also leaves people with an ongoing undercurrent of anxiety. We know this because nobody wants to repair the lottery box and because the rituals around the stoning have gradually been dropped. Nobody wants to think about this ritual or prolong it—but it is always there.
1. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is dystopic because the lovely, good life almost everyone in the society has is based on the relentless suffering of one innocent child:

It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

2. People in Omelas are very much like people in our own society. Many people in our society are willing to ignore the suffering they know exists as long as their own beautiful lives are not disrupted. Many people are willing to rationalize injustice as not so bad. Also, as in Omelas, there are a few in our culture who reject the cruelty and leave. However, this society is different because, except for the child, there does not seem to be inequality.
3. As with "The Lottery," this is a spiritual dystopia. Except for the suffering child, everything is beautiful in Omelas. Yet, the idea that this society is built on suffering is a moral stain that makes all the beauty distasteful. As with "The Lottery," a reader questions whether this is a moral choice the society needs to make or should make.
4. The philosophy of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, is described as follows:

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.

This political philosophy allows people to accept that the child's suffering is reasonable. In fact, they learn to rationalize it as not so bad:

But as time goes on, they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more.

Because everyone is "happy," the narrator says they do not necessarily need technology.
These two short stories are very similar in showing that it is dystopian to base the happiness or prosperity of the many on the suffering or death of one person. Both stories argue that the moral underpinnings of a society are very important and that integral to these moral underpinnings is a notion of fairness and justice for all.