Comparing and Contrasting
“Young Goodman Brown” and “The Lottery”
By: Wayne Gillard II
Professor C. Givens
ENGL 102-B19

Wayne Gillard
Prof. Givens
ENGL 102-B19
Essay 1 Outline

Thesis: The literary works of “The Lottery” and “Young Goodman Brown” both appear to show the fallibleness of human behavior and judgment.
I. Introduction/Statement of Thesis
II. Themes and Author’s Purpose
a. The Lottery
i. The hazards of following tradition or living according to society norms; doing things just because society accepts and follows. ii. The author’s purpose is to show how easily people are influenced by society and those around them. iii. Another theme is the occasional randomness of persecution or
I believe the author’s purpose was to show that all humans are subject to fall short of the glory of God, despite the show we put on at our religious recitals for the public eye. Back to “The Lottery”, the author developed another theme of the occasional randomness of persecution. In this short story, it seemed like a random draw, but the lottery happened once a year in many villages—that’s not random. Present-day parallels are easy to draw, because all prejudices, whether they are based on race, sex, appearance, religion, economic class, geographical region, family background, or sexual orientation, are essentially random. Those who are persecuted become “marked” because of a trait or characteristic that is out of their control—for example, they are the “wrong” sex or from the “wrong” part of the country. Just as the villagers in “The Lottery” blindly follow tradition and kill Tessie because that is what they are expected to do, people in real life often persecute others without questioning why. This helped show the author’s purpose to show the lack of loyalty. At the beginning of the story, families were gathering together being supportive, even when Mr. Hutchison revealed he was to be the one persecuted, Tessie, his