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Individuality in the giver
Individuality in the giver
Essays about the book the giver
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Imagine living in a life where you experience all types of foreign feelings for the first time. Never knowing these feelings and how to deal with them, along with these new feelings comes happiness, joy, fun, but also sadness, hurt, and pain. These are feelings nobody enjoys, but they make us human and we learn from our mistakes that we've made so we can change ourselves for the better. In The Giver by Louis Lowry she makes multiple points and expresses the true meaning of life. That it is so important to not take things for granted and live your life to the fullest. In the book the main character, Jonas, has to experience all of these new feelings never before known in his generation and find a way to fix things on his own, for he wants to share them with everybody else within his community. Having nobody to relate to will slowly eat away at you and cause you pain, loneliness, and eventually making the person under these circumstances feel excluded. The perception of feeling like an outsider would truly be a punishment to anybody. The …show more content…
Don't take things for granted. "Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything." (-Lowry)This quote means that of course people in the community needed to care. They tried to make improvement in the community, but did it in all the wrong ways. Also if you'd ever want to make a change, you have to care about it. Nothing will change if you don't care about what the situation is. Which brings us to the next quote. "What if people were allowed to chose their mates? And chose wrong?" (-Lowry) This quote has so much meaning within it! It proves just how important it is for us to make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes and hopefully don't take part in it again. Go out and live a life full of happiness and glory! Explore, Wonder! Whatever makes you happy, but learn from
The essential thing to overcoming adversity is the ability to cause change in yourself and others. In the book, The Giver, by Lois Lowry, Jonas is singled out after he isn’t chosen during the Ceremony of Twelve. He has to learn to overcome the pain of being The Receiver of Memory. He also has to face the truth and discover who his real allies are. This helps him to become a changemaker because he grows. He grows by using the pain to become stronger mentally and physically. Ultimately, Lowry teaches us that to make a change, you must display curiosity and determination.
Lois Lowry, the author of the book The Giver, often portrays her young protagonists from her experience as a child. Lowry was born on March 20, 1937 (Dellinger). During her early life, she was very interested in reading and was very solitary (Dellinger). This is where she got her idea to become an author. Lowry went on to pursue her dream of writing at Brown University (Dellinger). After graduating, she went back to college at the University of Southern Maine to further study writing (Dellinger). Lowry married a Naval officer and together they had four children (Dellinger). Lowry often used her children's escapades as inspiration for her books (Dellinger). Continuing on, The Giver is a story about a young boy named Jonas who lives in a dystopian society (Hanson). Jonas is different, though, because unlike the others in the community, he has the ability to see color and retain memories such as war, snow, and even a sunburn (Hanson). To sum up, Lois Lowry uses foreshadowing, setting, and symbolism in The Giver to portray the theme man vs. society.
Lois Lowry describes a futuristic world with controlled climate, emotions, way of living and eliminates suffering in her book The Giver. The main character, Jonas, shows the reader what his world is like by explaining a very different world from what society knows today. Everything is controlled, and no one makes choices for themselves or knows of bad and hurtful memories. There is no color, and everything is dull. As he becomes the Receiver who has to know all the memories and pass them down to the next Receiver, he realizes his world needs change. He starts to believe that a world of sameness where no one can decide or make choices for themselves is boring. Lois Lowry is warning readers that living in a world of sameness is not something to create as it is boring and dull, but if the world follows conformity and does not value diversity and difference enough, society could become that of Jonas’s.
The apple in The Giver symbolizes change. In Jonas’s visions he “had noticed, following the path of the apple through the air with this eyes, that the piece of fruit had-well, this was the part he couldn't adequately understand - the apple had changed. Just for an instant.” (21-22) This shows Jonas has the power to see beyond, he is experiencing the color red. Change may happen even by accident but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. Such as in this case where changing continuously allowed Jonas to help others constantly by taking the burden of all the pain in the world because of a mistake in genetic engineering. As you can tell sameness, precision, and indistinguishable people doesn’t mean perfection. Change is necessary to allow everyone a chance to grow, to experience, to grow as a person and in their jobs, to be unique, and different. That way
In “Meaning of Life”, Richard Taylor begins with questioning the meaning of life. He mentions this is rather hard to do and decides to define what meaninglessness is in order to understand the exact opposite: meaningfulness. Taylor asks the reader to recall the famous myth of Sisyphus to come about the definition of meaninglessness. He states that Sisyphus was condemned to roll a large boulder up a hill, only to have that boulder roll back down the hill, forcing him to repeat the task forever. Despite all his efforts, his existence amounts to nothing more than endlessly repeating the same task, which itself contributes to no greater goal or purpose. This, Taylor suggests, is the very image of meaninglessness. He defines meaninglessness as the following: “Meaninglessness is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite” (270).
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. 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).
Have you ever noticed those few people that are always by themselves or are alienated by others? Maybe it is because they may be poor, or how they dress, or where they are from. There are always those few people that are different, like in “The Doll’s house” how the Kelveys were alienated by their classmates due to what they wore and how they looked like. Being an outsider is universal because it happens in different places around the world. For instance, in “Sonnet, With Bird” the poem by Sherman Alexie, alienation happens all the way in England. Some might argue that it is not universal in the fact that everyone thinks differently or those who are alienated do not mind being alone and end up doing great things.
The Giver starts off as the ordinary story of an eleven-year-old boy named Jonas. When we meet the protagonist, he is apprehensive about the Ceremony of Twelve, at which he will be assigned his job. Although he has no clue as to what job he might be assigned, he is astonished when he is selected to be the Receiver of Memory. He learns that it is a job of the highest honor, one that requires him to bear physical pain of a magnitude beyond anyone’s experience.
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.
For most people having relationships and connections with other people is critical in living a content and fulfilling life, some people however are exception to this and they purposely lack motivation to connect with others. These people justify their actions by declaring that for them to connect they would first have to modify their personality, an action they do not wish to perform. In The Simple Gift, Billy the main character describes his disconnection with his hometown and especially his father, someone he openly despises. Herrick has used imagery to portray the town in which Billy resides in “This place has never looked so rundown and beat”. Billy having this hatred for his town left his home and now plans on wondering the streets as a homeless man. Even though Billy despised his town he still had connections to it, however negative they may have been, now being homeless he has lost these attachments, but he is perfectly contempt with this because he felt if he had tried to belong in his hometown he would have had to change himself and most likely end up like his father.
Have you ever been isolated? In the novel Lord of the Flies and the short story “I Only Came to Use the Phone” people have been put into extreme isolation. This is mostly shown through the characters of Jack from Lord of the Flies and Maria from “I Only Came to Use the Phone”. The authors’ purpose for doing this is to show people’s true nature when they are isolated from society. As shown in both texts, extreme isolation from society has a strong influence on human nature.
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.
Jonas’ community chooses Sameness rather than valuing individual expression. Although the possibility of individual choice sometimes involves risk, it also exposes Jonas to a wide range of joyful experiences from which his community has been shut away. Sameness may not be the best thing in the community because Jonas expresses how much he feels like Sameness is not right and wants there to be more individuality. Giver leads him to understand both the advantages and the disadvantages of personal choice, and in the end, he considers the risks worth the benefits. “Memories are forever.”
When I first started reading the book, I honestly thought that it was going to be a really boring book. After I was done reading the introduction and I started to read the first chapter, the book wasn’t boring. The introduction to the first chapter already interested me. I never really think about the meaning of life. When Joseph Campbell said that people think they are trying to find the meaning of life, they’re actually trying to gain an experience of being alive. When people find their experiences of being alive they are trying to fulfill their “physical plane” so they actually feel alive. Campbell has an interesting philosophy on marriage. Marriage has two stages Campbell says, “First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interlay of the sexes