THE GIVER Safety and sameness are important, but not as important as creativity and freedom of actions. In Lois Lowry's book The Giver, Jonas, a boy who is chosen to be The Receiver, is wondering the same thing. When Jonas is chosen to be The Receiver he is stunned and scared of the knowledge he will obtain. While Jonas is collecting knowledge from The Giver, we in our own society are pondering over our own freedoms. In The Giver there is no freedom of choice, there is no fun, you have your assigned job and you are assigned your family. Jonas has been assigned with the job of The Receiver of all memories. He can't tell his family what he did, he can't request a release and he can't request to have any medical assistance. In our society we have freedom of choice to select our job, we can be whatever we like. There are no job assignments like there is in The Giver, you can start your own business or you can work for someone if you wish. You also have the right to quit your job if you didn't like it, but in The Giver once you have your job you can't change. In my...
The Giver is about a boy named Jonas who was chosen to be the community’s next Receiver of Memory. He lived in a community where everything was chosen for the citizens, and everything was perfect. During Jonas' training, he realized that the community was missing something and that there was more in the world. Jonas wanted everybody to know that. The Giver book was then made into a movie. Though the two were based with the same story plot, there are three important differences that results with two different takes on the same story. The three main differences between the book and the movie are Asher and Fiona's Assignments, the similarity all Receivers had, and the Chief Elder's role.
The first reason why the community in the book The Giver should be given personal rights is because the inhabitants of the community could learn from their mistakes. Without any personal rights they cannot make their own decisions; if they don’t make their own decisions they cannot learn from their mistakes that their decisions had led them to. On page 98 in The Giver Jonas stated that “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?” This tells the reader...
Jonas decides to leave and change the lives of his people so that they can experience the truth. “The Giver rubbed Jonas’s hunched shoulders… We’ll make a plan” (155). Their plan involves leaving sameness and heading to Elsewhere, where Jonas knows the memories can be released to the people. He has a connection with Gabe, a special child who has experienced the memories, unlike the rest of the community. Jonas has a strong love for Gabe, and he longs to give him a better life. “We’re almost there, Gabriel” (178). Even with a sprained ankle, Jonas keeps pushing forward because he wants everyone to experience what The Giver has given him. He wants them to have a life where the truth is exposed. His determination allows him to make a change for a greater future in his community. This proves that Jonas has the strength to change his community for the
The Giver: Analysis of Jonas On the surface, Jonas is like any other eleven-year-old boy living in his community. He seems more intelligent and perceptive than many of his peers, and he thinks more seriously than they do about life, worrying about his own future as well as his friend Asher’s. He enjoys learning and experiencing new things: he chooses to volunteer at a variety of different centers rather than focusing on one, because he enjoys the freedom of choice that volunteer hours provide. He also enjoys learning about and connecting with other people, and he craves more warmth and human contact than his society permits or encourages. The things that really set him apart from his peers—his unusual eyes, his ability to see things change in a way that he cannot explain—trouble him, but he does not let them bother him too much, since the community’s emphasis on politeness makes it easy for Jonas to conceal or ignore these little differences.
Jonas is the protagonist in The Giver. He changes from being a typical twelve-year-old boy to being a boy with the knowledge and wisdom of generations past. He has emotions that he has no idea how to handle. At first he wants to share his changes with his family by transmitting memories to them, but he soon realizes this will not work. After he feels pain and love, Jonas decides that the whole community needs to understand these memories. Therefore Jonas leaves the community and his memories behind for them to deal with. He hopes to change the society so that they may feel love and happiness, and also see color. Jonas knows that memories are hard to deal with but without memories there is no pain and with no pain, there is no true happiness.
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...
In the book, The Giver, Jonas is portrayed as a kind, curious and rebellious individual with a keen sense of awareness. The beginning chapters revealed Jonas as a very naive and compliant person, similar to everyone else in his community. Instances, when he was a child and got reprimanded for small misunderstandings, made him like this. However, throughout the book, Jonas has grown into an independent and determined person, someone who wants to make a change. Jonas finds new strengths in his character which forms him into someone spectacular and distinctive.
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.
The first way The Giver is a dystopian novel is that information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted. This is an important characteristic of a dystopian novel when the government doesn’t let citizens have independent thought or freedom. This quality is clearly displayed is the novel when it is stated that the society wouldn’t “…dare to let people make choices of their own” (124). This shows an obvious restriction of independent thought from the citizens in society in The Giver. The resistance to allowing people to make their own decisions is demonstrated when the Committee of Elders chooses people’s jobs for them and decides who every person will be partnered with. These are both prime examples of how independent thought and freedom
In both The Truman Show and the Giver both of their communities are controlled. In The Truman Show, Truman's whole life is controlled by everyone around him. All of these choices are made for him and what everyone says is told to them. Jonas is life is also planned out for him, and all of these choices are as well. Both characters lives are controlled by a higher power but when they figure out about the higher powers control on them they try to break free. Even though one of them left for the truth in the other for a better life, they both leave for love.
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.”
Plot of The Giver The main character, Jonas, is part of a society with enforced sameness. This is achieved by removing every memory of a time before the sameness begun. Jonas is assigned as the new receiver of memory when he becomes a twelve, and the previous receiver, now the Giver, transmits the memories to Jonas. As his training goes on Jonas wants to make a difference, he wants everyone to see color and feel love like he does, which was the Giver’s intention.
In the Giver, Jonas is faced with many new and unusual experiences. The first of his experiences starts during the Ceremony of Twelve, when the chief elder is giving all the new Twelves their assignments, they skip over Jonas. At the end of the ceremony it is revealed that Jonas had not been assigned, but instead he was “chosen.” On his first day Jonas meets the Giver, and recieves his first memory. As weeks go by the Giver and Jonas get to know each other, one day Jonas asks the Giver about the previous receiver-in-training.
The movie, The Giver, is better than the book because it contains more action than the book describes and it’s very exciting and intense. Everything about the movie was perfectly put together which made the movie a great one to watch. There is also a moral to the movie which I think is “Stand up for what you believe in.” I think this is a great moral and goes well with the movie because it shows that even if the whole world turns on you, as long as you believe in yourself, you can achieve almost anything. I also like the fact that it’s a futuristic kind of movie; it makes it unique. The movie not only makes you feel a certain way; but it also makes you think about how our world would be if we did not have the gift of choice-making. The Giver