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Copywork
About This Passage
Poe distinguishes this terror from every earlier one: the storm and the famine were 'tumultuous' or slow, but the lottery is 'silent, definite, and stern,' a danger the narrator must coldly arrange against himself. Copying this passage teaches the long periodic sentence whose parenthetical aside and rising clauses delay the verb until the narrator's courage 'departed like feathers before the wind,' showing how syntax can enact the very collapse of will it describes.
The bitterest anxiety which I endured at any period of this fearful drama was while I occupied myself in the arrangement of the lots. There are few conditions into which man can possibly fall where he...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: how the narrator resolves to die rather than take part and pleads with Parker, who attacks him; how the others insist and the four draw lots, and Parker is chosen to die so the rest may live; how the narrator turns away from describing the worst; how, days later, he remembers an axe Peters had passed him and the friends cut through to the store-room; and how they bring up olives, ham, wine, and a Gallipago tortoise full of sweet water and give thanks to God. Then choose the moment you find most decisive and explain why.
Discussion Questions
- Parker reasons that 'it was unnecessary for all to perish, when, by the death of one' the rest might be saved, while the narrator resolves to 'suffer death... rather than resort to such a course.' Explain why the two men draw such opposite conclusions from the same desperate facts. Use details from the chapter.
- As he arranges the lots, the narrator's courage 'departed like feathers before the wind,' and he confesses running over 'a thousand absurd projects' of escape, even the thought of tricking Peters or Augustus into the short straw. Explain what this confession shows about the struggle between conscience and self-preservation at the edge of the lottery. Use details from the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Wild, violent, and full of confusion or uproar.
Item 2
The holding of something; the terms on which it is held.
Item 3
Outward manner or bearing.
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Critical Thinking
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