The Giver By Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry explores many themes throughout The Giver on of the main themes is that without memory there is no pain but there isn’t any memory either.

Lois Lowry expresses the connection between pain and happiness by contrasting the community’s life and the experiences of Jonas and Giver. While the community is very painless they also don’t feel true happiness “During his twelve years in the community, he had never felt such simple moments of exquisite happiness” (Lowry 172)this quote shows that in twelve years Jonas doesn’t feel the kind of happiness that he felt after receiving the memories for a few months. The parallel between Jonas’s happiness and his receiving of the memories makes an obvious correlation that leads the reader to think

that receiving the memories causes happiness.
Earlier in the book (before Jonas talking about how he was experiencing true happiness) he receives a memory of pain. Specifically the memory of breaking a leg very badly “The sled hit a bump in the hill and Jonas was jarred loose and thrown violently into the air. He fell with his leg twisted under him, and could hear the crack of bone. His face scraped along jagged edges of ice… In his agony he perceived the world "fire" and felt flames licking at the torn bone and flesh.” (Lowry 108-109) Including this memory and then having Jonas talk about happiness makes it seem as though the pain makes the happiness better because if a person experiences pain then moments without pain would be even better than the experiencing happiness without pain.
Even Giver knows that you can’t have happiness without pain because he tells Jonas about. Giver tells Jonas that “Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with difference. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.” (Lowry 95) The choice that Giver is talking about is the choice between a world without pain or a world with happiness which further ties the pain causes happiness and happiness causes pain theme into the text.
Lowry makes it very clear in The Giver that happiness needs pain to survive this becomes a main theme that is developed through Jonas’s and Giver’s conversations and the receiving of memory.