Controversial Conflicts in Award-Winning Novel The Giver by Lois Lowry

“The books that the world call immoral are the books that show the world its own shame,” famous author Oscar Wilde once said. In Lois Lowry’s controversial young adult novel The Giver, twelve-year-old protagonist Jonas lives in a dystopian world in which citizens in the Community have their career, spouse, and children picked for them by the Elders. The Community is dominated by the concept of Sameness where individuality, emotion, and color do not exist. In fact, everyone is assigned the same birthday. Once children turn the age of twelve, they are assigned their career path. Jonas learns that he is selected to become the Receiver of Memory, an honorary role, they call it. The Receiver is the person who holds all memories, good and bad, in order to maintain Sameness in the community; in short; the Receiver carries the burden of emotions and memories for everybody. The previous Receiver, who is now known as the Giver, transmits memories of pain and hope, loss and love to Jonas during his training, which changes the way Jonas views his Community. During the duration of his training, readers come across conflicts of euthanasia, sexuality, and suicide that parents and schools find too inappropriate and immoral for their children, leading The Giver to become number eleven on the American Library Association’s most challenged books of the 1990s (“Suicide Book Challenged in Schools”).

A lot of things in the world are considered inhumane. In the novel, there is a process known as “releasing.” It is not until later in the novel that Jonas watches a recorded tape of his father, a Nurturer, “releasing” the weaker of twin babies. Like other citizens, Jonas imagines “being released” as the pleasant notion of being transferred to ...

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...book is often dubbed immoral and inappropriate, it is meant to do nothing more than to show the world its own shame.

Works Cited

Baldassarro, R. Wolf. “Banned Books Awareness: The Giver by Lois Lowry.” World. 27 March 2011. Web. 3 April 2014.

“The Giver.” Dangerous Books. 1 May 2008. Web. 3 April 2014. .

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print.

Munley, Kyle. “Banned Books Week: The Giver.” Suvudu. 30 September 2010. Web. 3 April 2014.

Ouvrard-Prettol, Elsa. “Banned Books Week 2013: Defending The Giver by Lois Lowry.” Teen Librarian Toolbox. 23 September 2013. Web. 5 April 2014.

Sova, Dawn B. Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds. 3rd ed. New York: Facts on File, 2011. Web. EBSCOHost. 6 April 2014.

“Suicide Book Challenged in Schools.” USA Today. 20 July 2001. Web. 4 April 2014.