Have you ever thought about living in a world without pain, pleasure, memories, or or choices? The Giver, by Lois Lowry, takes place in a dystopian world and tells the fascinating story about Jonas, a twelve-year-old boy who is selected by his community to become the Receiver of Memory. His community doesn’t understand feelings, sameness, or love. They also don’t understand the world and don’t have any memories of it. Lowry shows the journey Jonas takes to save the people that he loves. The three main themes of The Giver that are either directly or indirectly stated in the book are that there can be no pain without pleasure and no pleasure without pain, it is important that you never lose your memories, and that everyone has the right to make …show more content…
Also, on page 191, after Jonas learns what a release is, he doesn’t want to go home and face his father and family. Then, The Giver tells Jonas that his father doesn’t know what he is doing the the small child. This is because Jonas’ father or anyone else in the community don’t understand the concept of death, sadness, or any other feeling. They just see death as a way to control the population. Jonas and The Giver are the only people who truly understand pain and joy. Similarly, Jonas’ parents don’t understand love. On page 159, he asks his parents if they love him, they act as if the word love is an inappropriate word and almost immediately scold him. Because, they don’t understand feelings very well, the people inhabiting Jonas’ community aren’t able to live life properly. Thus, a possible theme to The Giver might be that there can be no pain without pleasure and no pleasure without …show more content…
“I know it’s not important, what you wear. It doesn’t matter. But-”
“It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?” The Giver asked him.
(123)
This shows that in the community, nobody is given a choice to do anything and everything is the same. So, it can become very monotonous. In The Giver, the decision of jobs, family, and school is made not by the individual, but by other people with more power. This limits people to reach their full potential. When they make the wrong choice, they learn more about themselves and also learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately, when somebody else makes the choice for you, you won’t come to realize that. Therefore, everyone has the right to make choices.
The Giver is an exceptional novel which Publishers Weekly described as “a tale fit for the most most adventurous readers.” Some possible themes for this novel are that there can be no pain without pleasure and no pleasure without pain or it is important to never lose your memories because they make up who you are and give you wisdom. One last theme of The Giver is that everyone has the right to make a choice in their life. All in all, Lois Lowry did a very good job describing these
Jonas, the protagonist, is assigned the job of holding memories for the community. This is so that not everyone has to experience sad or painful memories. The Giver's job is to transmit these memories to Jonas and, in doing so, reveals the wonders of love, and family, and pain, and sorrow to this young boy. Jonas begins to resent the rules of sameness and wants to share these joys with his community. After receiving his first memory, Jonas says, "I wish we had those things, still." (p. 84)
The Giver let Jonas experience love at Christmas, in a memory but that was the only time Jonas ever got to enjoy the feeling. The citizens don’t even understand what the emotions are, because they just feel normal-not happy, excited, anger, or love. Jonas had just been given the memory of love from The Giver and decided to ask his dad about it. “‘Do you love me?’ There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle. ‘Jonas. You of all people. Precision of language, please!’” (127). Jonas’s dad got almost angry with Jonas because love isn’t supposed to be something that is in their community. Having emotions isn’t normal in The Giver. Love isn’t a natural thing someone has so his dad didn’t really understand what Jonas was talking
“Ignorance is not bliss. Bliss is knowing the full meaning of what you have been given.” said David Levithan. In her dystopian novel, The Giver, Lois Lowry is able to convey the same idea as this quote. In this book, people created the Community in which the members are in a supposedly safe and happy environment. The Elders choose Jonas, the main character, to be the next Receiver of Memory and his training helps him to experience the past and see the deep flaws in the Community.
The theme of suffering, In The Giver we see both physical and emotional suffering , the novel argues that pain is a part of human experience without it we cannot learn from the past and make informed decisions to a better future(Sisk17).
Jonas is the protagonist in The Giver. He changes from being a typical twelve-year-old boy to being a boy with the knowledge and wisdom of generations past. He has emotions that he has no idea how to handle. At first he wants to share his changes with his family by transmitting memories to them, but he soon realizes this will not work. After he feels pain and love, Jonas decides that the whole community needs to understand these memories. Therefore Jonas leaves the community and his memories behind for them to deal with. He hopes to change the society so that they may feel love and happiness, and also see color. Jonas knows that memories are hard to deal with but without memories there is no pain and with no pain, there is no true happiness.
The Giver is actually one of my all-time favorite books, so I’ve looked into why she left the book so inconclusive in the past. The Giver is basically about a boy named Jonas who lives in a perfect society. He lives in a household with his two parents and his little sister Lilly. When he becomes a 12, he goes through a huge ceremony and all the elders assign them their jobs. In this community, there is no lying, stealing, racism, pain, sunlight or color. Jonas was chosen to be The Receiver, and he didn’t know what to do because this job was such a big deal. Jonas then goes through training with the current Receiver, who is now The Giver. Training consists of The Giver passing down the memories from when the community was not what it is today. Memories that are passed down are things that are normal to us. Memories of sun, snow, pain, and sorrow.
The Giver presents a community that appears to be perfect on the surface. Jonas's community is free of warfare, pain, sorrow and other bitterness we suffer in our society. The world seems to be secure and undergoes little conflict. Such a community seems flawless and is the idealistic society that we longed to live in. However, through Jonas's training, the imperfections of the Utopian community are revealed.
Dystopian literature brings warning to the modern world and allows the audience to experience a new perception of life. The 1993 novel, The Giver, by Lois Lowry, fits into the dystopian genre because it makes judgment about modern society. She inscribed her novel “For all the children to whom we entrust the future”, which serves as a hope for a better future (Franklin). She targets the younger generation because they are the future. In Lowry’s novel, The Giver, Lowry’s perspective on modern society is that it tends to stay within its comfort zone, which creates limitations in life. The dystopian characteristics of the novel, importance of memory, the history surrounding the novel, and Lowry’s personal background all convey the notion that modern society should freedom bestowed it and to fully appreciate life in itself; society tends to take life’s freedoms for granted.
Love and other deep emotions are not worth giving up for safety. Jonas’ own mother doesn’t love him, she doesn’t know what love means. “Do you love me… So meaningless that it has become almost obsolete” (pg127). Jonas refused to live where your parents don’t know what the meaning of love is. So he left. He took a stand. Jonas found out that his father was going to kill his stepbrother, Gabe and he was furious. His father doesn’t even know what the word kill means. His father honestly thought he was helping Gabe by releasing him, just because he didn’t sleep soundly through the night. If he knew the emotions of love, empathy and hope he might have known that release is a bad thing. But they chose to not have feelings because they were afraid of heartbreaks,
society, everyone wears the same clothes, follows the same rules, and has a predetermined life. A community just like that lives inside of Lois Lowry’s The Giver and this lack of individuality shows throughout the whole book. This theme is demonstrated through the control of individual appearance, behavior, and ideas.
...wined into her writing the answer becomes clear. Society has boundaries and limits that are acknowledged should not be crossed. Yet humans have a craving to do so. Each time the fine line between acceptable and inappropriate is crossed, a new boundary is created; therefore a new crave develops and the cycle never ends. The Giver takes place after the last limit was broken, when the Elders took away some of the most beautiful pleasures of life, and the last line was drawn with all memories of freedom stored away. And this storage happens to be a human mind, the Giver, passing it down to the next Reciever into conceivably the end of time. Jonas disagrees; the memories he has seen, the pain he has endured, the beauty he has experienced must be shared. He wants the whole world to know the full extent and intention of life that God created. The boundary must be crossed.
When reading The Giver, readers feel the desperation of the community members as they sense that they are lacking something. They don’t know what, but they can feel that something is missing from their lives. Lowry’s purpose for writing this text was to make the reader reflect on the freedoms they encounter in their lives and see the value in something that we may take for granted every day of our lives. Seeing a community struggle without freedom and individuality helps readers value what they have. In modern societies, there is also a level of numbing of individualism, most of which is done by social media as well as mass media.
The Giver provides a chance that readers can compare the real world with the society described in this book through some words, such as release, Birthmothers, and so on. Therefore, readers could be able to see what is happening right now in the real society in which they live by reading her fiction. The author, Lowry, might build the real world in this fiction by her unique point of view.
The book The Giver is a dystopian book because you don’t get to make any of your own decisions. You would never know the truth about release. You would never experience life how you should experience it. The world may seem perfect from someone’s view inside the community, but from the outside it is harsh and horrible. Their world could be turned into a utopia eventually, but as of right know it is a
The community in the giver has no freedom, they are controlled by everything. They don’t know the true meaning of choice. They wake up to live another plain day with no choice. They don’t know what the feeling of choice is. They don’t