Ficciones: 5. The Babylon Lottery Summary & Analysis

The first-person narrator outlines the lottery of Babylon and his own personal fortunes and misfortunes. He says that he has been both a slave and a “proconsul”—a high-ranking government official—“like all men in Babylon.” The narrator references Babylon’s complex social structure as a result of the lottery, organized by Hebrew letters. Because he bears the mark of Beth (the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet), the narrator has power over those with the mark of Ghimel (the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet) on nights of the full moon. However, the narrator’s mark of Beth causes him to be subordinate to those with the mark of Aleph (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet), who on moonless nights are subordinate to those with the Ghimel mark.

The narrator describes the history of the lottery of Babylon. The narrator specifies that he knows nothing, and that “wizards have been unable to come to any agreement” on the matter of the lottery. Looking back at his time in Babylon under the lottery, the narrator is astonished at its reality. The narrator writes that, according to his father, the lottery began as a way for Babylonians to win money. However, once people became bored of this lottery, it developed into something more complex. The lottery, which a mysterious and mystical Company runs, evolved to include both positive prizes and punishments. The first of these punishments were jail sentences. However, after the introduction of these punishments, moralists determined that money is not a proportional prize—thus, prizes and punishments no longer had any monetary element.

The narrator explains more about the history of the lottery. After a slave is caught stealing a lottery ticket, the lower classes revolt and demand that all citizens be entered in the lottery. Now that the lottery involves every citizen, the Company becomes an all-powerful body, a replacement for the state of Babylon. The prizes can be as extreme as a promotion to high office of Babylon or, on the punishment side, death. The drawings occur every 70 days in the “labyrinths of the gods.”

In order to find out Babylonians’ true desires, and thus create effective prizes and punishments, the Company is fabled to have used astrologers and spies. People do complain about the lottery results, but the Company argues that any perceived mistakes are also part of the lottery, which relies completely on chance. The narrator writes that “a Babylonian is not highly speculative,” and hands himself over to fate without question. Because every action inside and outside of the lottery is determined by chance (for example, one drawing can be the sentence of death for a man, and then another drawing can choose a set of possible executioners, and so on), “the number of drawings is infinite.” In other words, each drawing can diverge into other decisions.

The Company launches a propaganda campaign that promotes the idea that the lottery controls everything, including everyday happenings that would have previously been labeled coincidences. Thus, the citizens of Babylon believed that every happening was an action of the Company. Some contrarians in Babylon and in the years following argue that the Company never existed, while others argue that the fact of the Company’s existence or nonexistence is irrelevant, as “Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.”