Theme Of Sameness In The Giver

Is Sameness the Answer?
Could you imagine a world where everything is the same? Lois Lowry wrote a novel called The Giver to show her idea of a perfect, or utopian world. Here, there is Sameness. Sameness is when there is no variety in anything and everything is alike. Jonas, the main character, is a 12 year old boy living in this utopian world. The community controls everything that the people do. This is how the community has Sameness. Jonas soon finds out when he is selected to be The Receiver of Memory, that his utopian world may not be as great as he thought it was. Losses of people are forgotten, there is climate control, and everyone is color-blind. These characteristics of the society are equal, painless, and protectful. To

When someone dies in the town, the people have a ceremony where the entire community chants the name of the lost person. As the day moves on, the chanting gets softer and eventually it is just a murmur. After this, the lossed member of the community is never mentioned again. “The entire community had performed the Ceremony of Loss together, murmuring the name Caleb throughout an entire day, less and less frequently, softer in volume, as the long and somber day went on, so that the little Four seemed to fade away gradually from everyone’s consciousness.” (44) Therefore, people do not dwell on losses of people. This can be utopian because people do not feel the grief and sadness of loss. It causes no pain and suffering for anyone, and people are not greatly affected by one’s death. This can also be dystopian because it is important to have love in your life. People are not affected in this society by losses because they never loved the person. It is better to love and then lose than to never have loved at all. Jonas is discouraged with this because he is starting to feel love toward people and he would like to remember someone he had lost after they had died. Even though Ceremony of Loss helps people not to grieve and be upset, there is no substitution or replacement for the love of someone, and ignoring someone’s death is not an appropriate