The Perfect Family In Lois Lowry's The Giver, And Modern Society

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Take a moment of time to send your imagination to the community of The Giver, in which Jonas lives. Picture living in a world with no real families, no pain, no choices, and no fear. Where the danger of ignorance is hidden in every shadow. Where everything is absolutely and utterly the same. When comparing this seemingly utopian society to modern society, these concepts seem totally alien. Despite these differences, there are also some terrifying similarities between the supposedly perfect community of Lois Lowry’s novel, The Giver, and modern day society. In any reality, being able to precisely state what is intended is an important life skill. Despite the need for this skill, there is no major enforcement or push for perfection when it
Parents constantly care for and interact with their children, children love and care for their parents and one another. The bond of modern day family is very intimate and holds every member close to the others. Though both the society of The Giver and modern society value this bond, but “family” doesn’t exactly mean the same thing for both of these societies. Family in the modern world means “any group of persons closely related by blood, as parents, children, uncles, aunts, and cousins” (dictionary.com) who tend to feel a very deep bonds and wide variety of emotions towards one another. On the other hand, the word “family” in Jonas’s world means a totally different thing. In The Giver, there are no blood relatives in a family. People are assigned to their mates and child/children, and have no choice on who they spend their lives with. Special “birth-mothers” are chosen every year to have all of the children of the community(Lowry 21) and the leaders of the community require the people to take pills in order to eliminate all intimate feelings toward other members of the community(Lowry 39). Due to the communities agreeing to “sameness”, nobody was allowed to have any special feelings for anyone, for fear of one person being unequal to another. The only solution the leaders saw was eliminating emotions altogether. Not one member of the families in the community were allowed to (or able to) feel any sort of physical or

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