Arguably, the main drive of “The Lottery” involves man vs. society conflict. It occurs when the protagonist has a distinct belief against many community members. The majority of them see the individual as the antagonist, whose aim is to violate the stipulated norms and ways of life. In the short story “The Lottery,” Tessie is against the lottery culture’s unfairness (Jackson, 2017). When her husband, Bill Hutchinson, picks the spotted slip, Tessie protests, depicting that he was harassed by Mr. Summers, but the townspeople refute her claims. Since the Hutchinson family has only one household, a second drawing is put according to the lottery culture dictations, whereby Bill, his wife Tessie, and their three children chose from the box (Jackson, 2017). Tessie unluckily picks the slip with the spot, and the crowd stones her to death while she screams, lamenting about the lottery exercise’s unfairness. In a man vs. society conflict, the latter win since they are the majority despite being wrong. Therefore, the conflict in “The Lottery” is that of man. vs. society.
In the workplace, I have experienced a conflict with my workmate. I always come to work early in the morning, mostly thirty minutes before the arrival of other employees. My colleague and I were supposed to enter the suppliers’ data and make invoices that would facilitate their payment disbursement. I unknowingly started by working on the data which my colleague had already worked on, making him devastated to the extent of quarreling. However, we solved our disagreement amicably, whereby I left the specific provider analysis and shifted to another supplier he had not worked on yet. Understandably, I learned that in conflict resolution, effective communication is vital. Moreover, I realized that resolving a conflict requires one person to control their temper when the other is high to calm the situation.
Reference
Jackson, S. (2017). The Lottery. In L. Kirszner & S. Mandel (Eds), Portable literature: Reading, reacting, and writing (9th ed, pp. 334–343). Cengage Learning.