Destruction or Death Wish Stage
Here is the moment in the tragedy when the hero is destroyed. What's interesting about the lottery is that physical destruction only overtakes one aspect of the "hero," Tess Hutchinson. The rest of the "hero" (the village) remains intact – but at what cost?
Forgive us an analogy: it's like that famous part in Oedipus the King (check out the Shmoop's coverage of Oedipus the King) when Oedipus tears out his eyes because he's overwhelmed with guilt about having married his mother and killed his father. In this analogy, Tess is like Oedipus's eyes and the village, like the rest of Oedipus: one part has been destroyed, but it's only symptomatic of a larger problem ravaging the body of the village.
This tradition of the lottery may seem natural and inevitable to the villagers but we in the audience know that you can't ritually kill a member of your village every year without serious moral consequences. And indeed, there's plenty of evidence that these abuses have left the village's figurative body permanently damaged: consider the mysteriously absent Mr. Watson, or the suggestion that the eldest Dunbar boy was recently killed (see "The Watsons and the Dunbars" in the "Character Analysis" for more on this). And how about the fact that the villagers have let slip much of the ritual of the lottery, remembering only the most vicious part, the stoning (check out the "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" section on "the lottery")? Even Old Man Warner bemoans that people aren't what they used to be – the lottery has continued on past any functional purpose, so that now it's a formal, hollow ritual of "civilized" violence.
While the lottery may appear to be a bonding ritual in which the rest of the village is brought closer together thanks to the sacrifice of one member, Jackson seems to imply that a society built on cyclical brutality can only breed more brutality. The rapidity with which Mrs. Delacroix drops her friendship bond with Tess, and with which Bill forsakes her, only underlines that the conception of the lottery is broken beyond salvaging. In regularly destroying one part of the village, this community is undermining the possibility of real love bonds that would sustain the village. What we've got here is both destruction and a death wish: the hero, the village, is both killing the excluded outsider and destroying itself.