The society in The Giver by Lois Lowry is fairly broken and messed up. Everyone inside the community thinks that everything is under control and they like living that way, because they don’t know any other way to live. To them they live in the perfect world, a utopia. To everyone outside of the community it is a dystopia. They are controlled immensely. There are a few reasons why the community is a dystopia, they have no choice or freedom, and they don’t know what color, music, real emotion, and feelings are.
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
…show more content…
Nobody in the community knows what feelings or real, deep emotion is. They can’t live with music or color. They live in a bland community where everybody wears the same things. They live in a world of different shades of grey. They don’t have seasons, what would life be like without summer? Summers without sun wouldn’t be a problem in their community either because they have no weather. “‘What did you perceive?’ The Giver asked. ‘warmth’, Jonas replied, ‘and happiness’. ‘And--- let me think. Family. And something else--- I can’t quite get the word for it’. ‘It will come to you’. ‘Who were the old people? Why were they there?’ It had puzzled Jonas, seeing them in the room. The Old of the community did not ever leave there special place, the House of the Old, where they were so well cared for and respected. ‘They were called Grandparent.’ ‘Grand parents’” (123)? In this quote about Christmas Jonas learns more about family and being together, joyful. It’s sad that the community does not have anything special such as Christmas. Jonas learned the new concept (to him), of grandparents. He thinks grandparents are special but he doesn’t have real parents. At this point in the book Jonas understands real emotion and feeling for someone else, such as loving your family members, and he longs for that …show more content…
While reading The Giver, the community gives off a sense of control over everybody. As the book goes on form chapter to chapter, more rules and control are discovered. The people in charge chose for the whole community what everyone should wear, what everyone should eat, what children should learn in school, what to think, ect. From morning to night, any citizen from the community is being controlled. Everything they do in a day gets controlled. From what time to wake up all the way from the time they go to bed. “‘Jonas has not been assigned,’she informed the crowd, and his heart sank. Then she went on. ‘Jonas has been selected...Jonas has been selected to be our next Receiver of Memory’” (60). The community controls what job you have for the rest of your life until you enter the House of the Old. Jonas, who eventually finds out about how controlled everybody is, decides to leave. Anybody would want to leave that community after the truth was unleashed because they would realize how controlled they are. The community kills babies and old people too. They kill them because it’s part of the process of sameness, which is also another way everything is
Even though both the society in The Giver by Lois Lowry and modern society are both unique in their own ways, our society is a better society to live in. Our society gives us more freedom to choose for our own benefits and
The society in Lois Lowry’s book The Giver is like a freshly printed newspaper every page is crisp and clean, but when a page is crumpled or stained the only solution is to remove it. Problems in the town are created and solved by the same cause, euthanasia. Euthanasia, in the book, is used on multiple types of people; the young who would create problems for the society; the old; and anyone who threatens the order and structure of the place. The leaders euthanize people to protect their community. Usually in situations where many suffer and only one or few benefit, it is whoever is in charge that gets blamed, but since the rulers of the society are just as unaware as the people, it is the creators of the society that are at fault.
The story in The Giver by Lois Lowry takes place in a community that is not normal. People cannot see color, it is an offense for somebody to touch others, and the community assigns people jobs and children. This unnamed community shown through Jonas’ eye, the main character in this novel, is a perfect society. There is no war, crime, and hunger. Most readers might take it for granted that the community in The Giver differs from the real society. However, there are several affinities between the society in present day and that in this fiction: estrangement of elderly people, suffering of surrogate mothers, and wanting of euthanasia.
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.
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. The community allows little individual freedom and choice. In allowing only one person, the Receiver, to bear the memories of the world, the community frees itself from suffering and conflict. As a result, it gives up the ability to experience true feelings, passion, individual privacy, freedom and knowledge. To maintain the community's order, strict rules are applied to the inhabitants. "Releases" ( a less offensive term for kills) are performed to the citizens who jeopardize the stability and peace of the community. The inhabitants' careers and spouses are chosen by the Elders (or government).
Lowry writes The Giver in the dystopian genre to convey a worst-case scenario as to how modern society functions. A dystopia is an “illusion of a perfect society” under some form of control which makes criticism about a “societal norm” (Wright). Characteristics of a dystopian include restricted freedoms, society is under constant surveillance, and the citizens live in a dehumanized state and conform to uniform expectations (Wright). In The Giver, the community functions as a dystopian because everyone in the community conforms to the same rules and expectations. One would think that a community living with set rules and expectations would be better off, but in reality, it only limits what life has to offer. Instead, the community in the novel is a dystopian disguised as a utopian, and this is proven to the audience by the protagonist, Jonas. Jonas is just a norma...
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 domestic structure in The Giver is an exceptionally superficial one. Reason being, although it appears to be a typical family, hence two parents and two children, the fact that these people were jostled together by a council reveals precisely how synthetic their so called families are. The datum that a council makes decisions for these people demonstrates their desire to be controlled and to eliminate pain from their lives. This particular society wants to placate all of the burdens of life and responsibility on a relatively minuscule and select assemblage of people. The council is a rather shadowy aspect of this story. Although they too do not want full accountability and redistribute that burden to the Receiver of Memory which happens to be the main character Jonas.
Jonas hates how his society decides to keep memories a secret from everyone. Jonas says: “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared” (Lowry 154). Jonas feels that memories, whether it be good or bad, should be shared with everyone. Furthermore, memories allow the community to gain wisdom from remembering experiences of the past. As for The Giver, The Giver disagrees with how the community runs things. He believes that memories should be experienced by everyone as well, because life is meaningless without memories. The Giver says: “There are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don’t want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable–so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen [...] It’s just that… without memories, it’s all meaningless. They gave that burden to me” (Lowry 103). The Giver is burdened with the responsibility to not share memories even though that is what he feels the community deserves. In addition, he believes the community lives a very monotonous life where nothing ever changes. Everything is meaningless without memories because the community does not know what it is like to be human without feelings. Overall, Jonas and The Giver’s outlooks on their “utopian” society change as they realize that without
“Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life” (Ursula K. Le Guin). Preservation of individual freedoms and choice is paramount to preserve what makes humanity unique: the ability to choose one's own actions. Utopian societies often attempt the impossible: to create a perfect life for all of its inhabitants. Their attempt comes from the elimination of choice, such as the Alliance’s actions on Miranda in Serenity and in Lois Lowry’s The Giver, where society has adopted a Sameness model. In both of these contemporary examples, the elimination of choice allowed for a utopian society to flourish, yet soon they showed their true colors: dystopia. In these two works, what makes a seemingly utopian society actually dystopian is a loss of individual liberty and human emotions.
Lois Lowry’s The Giver considers something the world takes for granted: personal empowerment. These simple day-to-day decisions create what the world is. Without self-empowerment and right to believe in a personal decision, what is the human race? The world can only imagine, as Lois Lowry does in The Giver. She asks: What if everything in life was decided by others? What if spouses, children, the weather, education, and careers were chosen based upon the subjects’ personality? What if it didn’t matter what the subject thought? Jonas, the Receiver, lives here. He eats, sleeps, and learns in his so-called perfect world until he meets the Giver, an aged man, who transmits memories of hope, pain, color, and love. Jonas then escapes his Community with a newborn child (meant to be killed), hoping to find a life of fulfillment. On the way, he experiences pain, sees color, and feels love. Irony, symbolism, and foreshadowing are three literary devices used to imply the deeper meaning of The Giver.
Imagine a world with no color, weather, or sunshine. The Giver is a book by Lois Lowry and is based on a utopia where no one makes choices, feels pain, or has emotions. The book takes place in a community where all of this is true. The story is about an 11-year old soon to be 12 year-old named Jonas who is unsure of which job he will get when he is 12. Jonas changes throughout The Giver and as a result, tries to change the community.
One can feel massive pressure on what to eat, what to wear, even what to think. Sometimes, one can make the wrong choices, some with awful outcomes. Since the Community in The Giver has the benefit of not having the capability to make decisions, they live like robots, droning along and obeying all the rules. This makes life much easier and livable because no choice equals no conflict. Since they have no reason to act out, they can live peaceful lives.
When asked why Lowery used a dystopian society she stated, “ I chose the setting because I wanted to give the reader a warring that society will never be perfect.”(Lowry) If she would have chosen a different setting the book I do not believe the book would have been the same. Lowry stated, “that when writing The Giver created a world that existed in her imagination only. She got ride of all the things she feared and disliked: violence, prejudice, poverty and injustice.
Lois Lowry describes in her novel The Giver, a community practically perfect: organized, ruled, and outlined. The whole community is governed by a group of elders called “The committee”, who had make the rules that conduct the society’s lifestyle and behavior, in order to maintain everything in equilibrium and unbiased. The committee also conducts the Decisions like the assignment or profession, or the release of some members of the community. Jonas, who is the main character in the story describes the way that he looks the world where he is living and how this world changes in a dramatically way when he starts to receive knowledge through the Giver in his training to become the Receiver of memory. Jonas discovered what happened when an alien