Character Analysis: The Giver

In Lois Lowry's book, The Giver, there abides a dystopian community, Jonas matures over the year, after receiving a very important assignment. This assignment is called “The Receiver,” in which he receives memories that he did not experience, but in a way experiences when his mentor, The Giver gives him the memories. He has to be very mature for this assignment, because he has to experience extraordinary amounts of pain. Jonas is very naive to start out with, later on he starts to understand his community better, by the end of the book he see the truth and realizes what was actually happening. Jonas changes, and matures throughout this book, ultimately realizing how selfish his community is, and decides to go elsewhere because he knows how wrong and dysfunctional their community is.
To start off with, Jonas is smart, and he is also fairly young and hitting puberty, so he is having feelings of love, lust, and emotions, which is know as “stirrings,” Jonas and his family were sitting at the the table after they had finished eating, they were talking about the dreams they had had the night before. When Jonas’ father asks him what he felt, Jonas answered with: “The wanting... I knew that she wouldn’t. And I knew that she shouldn’t. But I wanted it so terribly. I could feel the wanting all through me,” (Lowry 36). He wanted

The Giver and Jonas were talking about how his father would be releasing a twin that day, and The Giver showed him the projection of how the releases were done. “‘He killed it! My father killed it!’ Jonas said to himself, stunned at what he was realizing. He continued to start at the screen numbly,” (Lowry 150). He was astonished, he was numb. He had been through so much, and now he comes to find out that the release is really when they kill those people. Jonas was heartbroken when he found out that the people who were “released” were actually