Shirley Jackson intended to create and maintain the impression that there was a large crowd of people in attendance at this annual ceremony. In order to do this she had to mention many people's names and provide little snatches of different conversations. She does not focus on any one individual until Tessie Hutchinson draws the fatal slip of paper with the black dot. Then it is as if the camera moves in on this one frightened woman as her friends and neighbors, as well as the members of her own family, suddenly become coldly and silently menacing. Jackson did not want to draw reader attention to the Hutchinson family or to Tessie until that point, because it might make it seem too likely that someone in the Hutchinson family would be doomed. Suspense is created in the assembled crowd, as well as in the reader's mind, by the big question of who will be chosen in the lottery.
Dunbar is only one of the many people mentioned in the story. What makes him stand out is that he is the only person who doesn't show up for the drawing. This fact indicates that attendance is mandatory and that everybody must be accounted for. Nobody can escape by malingering.
Mr. Summers consulted his list. "Clyde Dunbar." he said. "That's right. He's broke his leg, hasn't he? Who's drawing for him?"
It is decided that Dunbar's wife will draw for her husband. In this patriarchal society the men draw for their families, and then the individual members of the family that gets the black dot all draw for themselves in a final round. If the Dunbar family had happened to get chosen, then Clyde might have been the victim by a process of elimination. In other words, his family members would all draw slips in the second round of the lottery, and if they all drew blanks it would mean that the last one, the one with the black spot, would belong to Clyde. In that case there would be a slight logistical problem. All the people in the township would have to carry stones to Dunbar's house, where he would either be in bed or resting in a chair, and stone him to death there. Since he had a broken leg, it would be impossible for him to run for his life when he saw the mob approaching.
Mrs. Dunbar tells her oldest son to run home and tell his dad that the black spot has been drawn by Bill Hutchinson, meaning that the five members of that family will draw on the second round to determine which of them will get stoned to death.
Then the voices began to say, "It's Hutchinson. It's Bill," "Bill Hutchinson's got it."
"Go tell your father," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.
Mrs. Dunbar sends her son home because she knows her husband, like everybody else, will be anxious to find out which family was chosen. She also knows that he will be relieved to hear that it wasn't the Dunbar family. And, furthermore, since she was the one who drew for the family that year, she feels proud of herself for accomplishing a man's job effectively and for drawing one of the blank slips for her family. It is eerie to think that if her husband had gotten the black spot by default--that is, if she had drawn the black spot for the family and then she and her children had drawn blank slips individually--she would have had to participate in stoning her husband to death.
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