Perfection in Lois Lowry’s The Giver

Perfection: Step to Dictatorship?

No world can be perfect, for the only way to have an ideal world is not to have a world at all. The reader soon discovers this in Lois Lowry’s publication The Giver. In this book, a boy named Jonas is taken through a journey in which he shapes his destiny through decisions he makes and trials he face in a supposed ideal world. One, by reading the book, uncovers the fact that this supposedly perfect world, because of its’ hold on an individuals emotion, the elders recanting people’s unalienable rights to privacy, the government employing an unrestrained grip of control, and the community’s over obsessive view on order, is actually an example of perfection taking a bad turn.

First, in the real world, emotions are part of a person’s daily life. They shape everyday actions, but when they repudiate the emotions from the people of the community, what are they to do? For example, there is a time when Jonas makes a mistake and is broadcasted across the communal intercom, “he remember[s] [the announcement] with humiliation, […] Jonas [was thinking] again about the incident. He is bewildered by it” (Lowry 23). The way Jonas feels is an illustration of how at first this plan seems to be a beneficial plan, but when scrutinized enough, we see what makes it plan faulty. The downside of the plan shows that people like Jonas, during this process of announcement, would receive a kind of embarrassment, as Jonas expressed above, that could cause emotional consequences. The initial plan is created to keep people from repeating the incident again through the process of embarrassment and humiliation but in this perfect world, one can see that this becomes a discreet flaw in this system. For if one is to receive an...

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...develop inhabitants. But this shows that if they can get that smart there is a possibility that they could then off power the system. As the reader would likewise conclude this is seems to be a world of order it is actually just a tower of cards bound to fall.

As the reader would concededly agree, this world of flaws in a supposed perfect world because of its’ clutch on characters sensation, the elders retract every individuals rights to privacy, the government employing an unrestrained clench of control, and their over compulsive view on arrangement, and an actual example of gift of leadership gone wrong. Though it seems that the world is very faultless through its’ inhabitant, when we really look into the government one sees in the end the world of The Giver, is not free of flaws.

Works Cited
Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York, NY: Laurel-Leaf, 1993. 8-27. Print.