Why do the characters in The Lottery and Other Stories so often misread the people closest to them?

Set against the courteous surfaces of postwar small-town America, Shirley Jackson's 1949 short-story collection The Lottery and Other Stories examines why her characters so often misread the people closest to them. To a significant extent, Jackson attributes this misreading to the gap between a respectable surface and a hidden truth¹, while also showing that her characters prefer their comforting first impressions to the harder work of truly knowing one another. Ultimately, despite the closeness of family, neighbours and colleagues, Jackson shows that people who trust only appearances will mistake one another at every turn.

From the outset, Jackson traces this misreading to the gap between surface and reality, a pattern enacted first as the protagonist's self-misreading in "The Daemon Lover" and then as the courteous disguise of "Of Course". That private self-coercion finds its surface in "The Daemon Lover", where the lonely protagonist's insistence that "this is my wedding day"² summons a marriage that exists only in her speech, a fantasy the author casts as the point where social expectation hardens into private compulsion. Here, the author develops the motif of self-erasure through her reminder that she is "thirty-four years old after all", exposing how the calendar itself operates as a coercive instrument³ that renders inventing a fiancé less shameful than admitting she is alone. Setting the protagonist's pleading that "it's very important" against the town's incredulous indifference, Jackson presents the gap between private urgency and public disbelief as the divide that isolates her. Contextualising this collapse within the postwar expectation that a woman's respectability depends on marriage, the author contrasts the "overly pretty" costume of the bride-role the woman rejects with her buried sense that "there's more than you think" to her inward life, capturing how conformity demands the erasure of any self that refuses the assigned part. By rendering the protagonist complicit in her own deception, Jackson insists that misreading begins inward⁴, the internalised conviction that marriage is mandatory blinding her to the reality of her own life. Just as Jackson makes the protagonist of "The Daemon Lover" misread her own life, the author turns outward to neighbours who misread one another through politeness, the mechanism shifting from private delusion to public courtesy. The author names that public courtesy as the mechanism of conformity in "Of Course", figuring each polite "of course" as a small surrender of preference⁵ that superficially agrees while quietly sealing the speaker's entrapment. Indeed, Jackson exposes the involuntary duty of neighbourly obligation through Mrs Harris's declaration that her family "do not go to movies", where even a simple cinema outing is framed as intellectual decline to enforce the cursory sense of superiority. Setting Mrs Harris's expressed wish that "I do so hope we'll be friends"⁶ against Mrs Tylor's inability to refuse, the author frames the language of companionship as the instrument of control. Addressing this friction within the suburban expectation that a good neighbour never gives offence, Jackson contrasts Mrs Harris's self-serving pursuit of a "really peaceful life" with her dismissal of popular culture as "intellectually retarding", capturing how conformity is enforced through the fear of seeming rude. Through this cordial ambush the author reveals how easily a courteous surface is misread⁷, as Mrs Tylor mistakes coercion for friendship and complies. In doing so, Jackson establishes misreading as the default currency of her world, ordinary people trusting the surface long before the person beneath it becomes visible.