In Shirley Jackson's American Gothic tale "The Lottery," the most
             interesting and revealing of all the characters is Mr. Summers, the so-
             called "conductor" of a bizarre and disturbing practice that takes place
             yearly in an unidentified village somewhere in the Northeast. This Mr.
             Summers, a "round-faced, jovial man (who) ran the coal business" and
             garnered the sympathies of his fellow villagers ". . . because he had no
             children and his wife was a scold," has obviously been the leader of the
             "lottery" for quite some time, for he alone knows the history of this
             practice, due to his yearly insistence "about making a new box" to hold the
             slips of paper with the names of all the villagers. Exactly how many years
             this "lottery" has been practiced is unknown, yet the old box has
             apparently seen better times, for it is now shabby and is "no longer
             completely black but splintered badly along one side. . . . an in some
             Thus, as the "conductor" of the "lottery", Mr. Summers could be
             viewed as "the master of the fates of his fellow villagers, due to being
             the one that creates and dispenses the slips of paper from inside the
             mysterious black wooden box" (Hall, 56). Summers is also responsible for
             the box's safe-keeping and obviously played a major role in changing the
             "chips of wood that had been used for generations" to slips of paper
             because of the growing population of the village and the fact that slips of
             paper "fit more easily into the black box." As to the ritual itself, Mr.
             Summers evokes an air of nonchalance, for while dressed "in his clean,
             white shirt and blue jeans," he casually leans on the black box as if it
             were nothing more than a prop. His style of dress makes it clear that he is
             either a local businessman, such as a grocer or the owner of a hardware
             store, or a farmer from the nearby countryside. Yet he also sees the ritual
             ...