Yoonho Lee World Lit Journal

The Lottery, By Shirley Jackson (1948) Rating: 9/10 I read <The Lottery> back in 5th grade, elementary school before, but reading it as a high school student was different from back then. I was able to identify three points from this story that reflected our reality. First, from the information that even though they knew other towns have banned the lottery system, no one stands up to change the tradition. The complacency and stagnant characters we see in our society were well reflected in the story. The second point was how weak we become in front of death. Even old man Warner, his accomplishment of surviving the lottery 77 times, it is all meaningless when he encounters the stones flying at him. Also, the point that none of the villagers realizes until they become stoned to death was another reason why humans are foolish which was shown by the author. Overall, I felt that this story has a lot of criticism of reality and that it delivered the message in the most effective way tha...

Cat Person, By Kristen Roupenian (2017) Rating: 8.5/10 Reading my first Roupenian story, one thing I realized was that Kristen Roupenian shares a similar writing style with Shirley Jackson. The simplistic and clear plot that both authors show as they unfold the story's message. They both develop the story in a very short scene of life with a minimum amount of characters. I personally thought this style of writing shown in <Cat Person> was the reason why many men hated this story. There are both pros and cons of this style, the pros are that it delivers the message to the audience very directly, but the cons are that it's too delivered too simply and without any deeper explanation that audiences can also misinterpret the message. For this case, it only reflected Margot's point of view that male readers misunderstood the message as if Roupenian is trying to criticize males, that in the end, Roupenian only seems as trying to induce social conflicts. As I said, this story...