The Giver By Lois Lowry: The Community Vs. Real World

The Community Vs. Real World.
In the Giver by Lois Lowry, the story is about a small community which is ideal, and everything is perfect. Everyone is happy with their lives. Jonas, the protagonist, also felt like that as well. He too, believed everything was perfect. But later on, he sees just how dangerous and terrible his community is. The community was seen as flawless at glance, but the dark side of it reveals what really happens.
To begin, the community’s “surface” has a lot to it. People are assigned families. They don’t choose to get a spouse, they just have to be assigned one. To get a child, they are assigned one. This is very different from our world. In our world, people make families on their own. We obviously get to choose

and fall in love our partner, and reproduce on our own(unless you want to adopt a child). Jonas’ community also does not get to choose their jobs. For example, the Ceremony of Twelve is a ceremony where all the twelve year olds get assigned their jobs. On page 53, the jobs are given to the first few twelve year olds. Except they do not call it jobs, they call the jobs assignments. This is because the Community of Elders, the people who make all the choices, assign jobs to everyone when they are twelve. They get no freedom to choose at all. On the other hand, we get to pursue any profession we want. The community has a lot of rules, making everyone’s lives very controlled. For us, we have more liberty, and don’t have as much rules we have to follow in our society.
Once you dig deeper into the community, you start to see what really happens. As mentioned before, there are lots of rules. If you were to break these rules a number of times, then you would be “released”. To be released is not just being set free from the community. Instead, it is being put to death. In addition, they also release newborn children if they aren't perfect. This is shown where Jonas watches a newborn’s release. “He pushed the plunger slowly, injecting the liquid into the scalp vein until the syringe is empty... As he continued to watch, the newchild, no longer crying, moved his arms and legs in a jerking motion. Then he went limp. His head fell to the side, his eyes half open. He was still.” This shows that “release” is really just murder, they had just called it by a different name. We also do something similar to release, but only if someone has done something very bad. An example of this is murdering a multiple number of people. Then you get the death penalty, which is like release.
To conclude, the community's good side and bad side is more of an extreme
version of the world. They give punishments for unreasonable things, while we are more free and punish for more understandable crimes. The community is very different from our world.