The three short stories—Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education," and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"—all deal with tradition. Tradition is at the heart of these stories. Unfortunately for some of the characters, however, those traditions are brutal or inhumane. "The Lottery," the best-known of the three stories, is most overtly about tradition, although Le Guin's narrative runs a close second. Every summer, in June to be exact, towns and villages set aside one or more days to conduct a lottery, the nature of which only becomes apparent late in the story. In Jackson's fictional village, the lottery takes only a couple of hours, and is always held from ten in the morning until noon. The "winner" of this macabre ritual, however, is stoned to death by his or her fellow townsfolk. The lottery is a tradition, but one with an evil but unclear purpose, and the fact that the purpose is unclear is Jackson's point. People have clung tenaciously to their tradition even long after the original purpose of the ritual has disappeared.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is similar to Jackson's story in that it involves a ritual or tradition whose details can only be described as horrific. Whereas "The Lottery" is about a tradition that involves the ritualistic stoning of one unfortunate citizen of a village, Le Guin's fictional society is about a sort of utopia, Omelas, that annually celebrates the Festival of Summer. All is good in Omelas. The one notable element of this tradition with which one might take exception is the designation of one particular child for a level of mistreatment that conjures images of concentration camps. Le Guin's narrator describes this exception to the rule in her fictional world as follows:
"In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect."
Like Jackson's story, Le Guin's is about the perpetuation of a tradition that involves fealty on the part of the masses to the inhumane nature of that ritual.
Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education" is a departure from the stories of Jackson and Le Guin. In fact, in stark contrast to "The Lottery" and "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," Alexie's narrative is grounded firmly in fact. Alexie is American Indian and grew up during an age, not long ago, when Indian children were placed in government schools designed specifically to remove the "Indian" from the child. These schools were tools used by the dominant European culture to force assimilation on students from a marginalized people, and Alexie was one such student. His story is structured chronologically, with a few short paragraphs describing events or developments from each year of elementary and high school. Each school year involves his own perspective on some demeaning development, with the white overseer condescendingly commenting on the students placed in his or her charge. Note, in the following passage from "the seventh grade," Alexie's observation:
"I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house and kissed the white girl who would later be raped by her foster-parent father, who was also white. They both lived on the reservation, though, and when the headlines and stories filled the papers later, not one word was made of their color.
"Just Indians being Indians, someone must have said somewhere and they were wrong."
For Alexie, discrimination and prejudice are a tradition imposed upon the indigenous peoples of North America. As the Indian children progress through the school system, they are stripped of their culture, humiliated, and invariably left with little or no future. As the author concludes his narrative:
"Back home on the reservation, my former classmates graduate: a few can't read, one or two are just given attendance diplomas, most look forward to the parties. The bright students are shaken, frightened, because they don't know what comes next.
"They smile for the photographer as they look back toward tradition."
In "Indian Education," as in the other two stories, tradition is a ritual carried forward irrespective of the dehumanizing nature of the activity or the obsolescence of the underlying cause. All three authors indict humanity's propensity to blindly follow traditions or rituals without question. People accept as a normal part of their existence the ritualistic behaviors that demean or even destroy others. That Alexie's, unlike Jackson's and Le Guin's, is based solidly upon the author's real life makes his story considerably more poignant. The other two stories, however, should compel reflection on the nature of some traditions.
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