Imagine living in a world where everything was just shades of black and white, where the wind never blew and the rain never fell, where day to day activities were just a routine and they never varied. Imagine a world where someone else chooses your career, your spouse, and your children. Where diversity and uniqueness is frowned upon and sameness is praised. In a world that strives for sameness and glorifies conformity, something is bound to slip through the cracks. In the novel, The Giver by Lois Lowry, she “invites the reader to experience a world without poverty, without suffering, without chaos…readers in inquire about how such a society functions and in the struggle to reconcile it with the reality they know… perhaps the most important …show more content…
It allows us to not only read what we want, but also believe and be as unique as we want. However, in the world that Lois Lowry has built for her audience in The Giver, there is anything but diversity, as “the society has elected to move toward sameness, climinating choices, pain, warfare, and starvation” (Hurst 75). This community is built solely on sameness: the idea that everyone should dress the same as everyone else in either their age group or in their profession, eat the same things, and do the same routine as everyone else. One example of sameness within the novel is that of the children’s clothing; everyone in the same year dresses exactly alike. For instance, “fours, fives, and sixes all wore jackets that fastened in the back” (Lowry 40), and sevens get front-buttoned jackets. Besides the few different careers that everyone is assigned, this is one of the few forms of same, but diverse. Another consistency in the community is the color of flesh. The Giver explains to Jonas that “flesh was many different colors. That was before we went to sameness” (Lowery 94).The Giver references sameness several other times throughout the novel, including when the people decided to make the “choice, the choice to go to Sameness…we relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences…” (Lowry 95). The idea of sameness is consistently brought to the fore front for the reader to question. If …show more content…
In The Giver, the only memories that people have are memories of their own lives. They do not know about history or colors, they do not experience weather, they do not even know about certain feelings or emotions. There are only two people in the entire novel that possess memories of all these items and those two people are the Giver and the Receiver, Jonas. The lack of external memories does not really seem to cause much of a problem within the community. Without the knowledge of hate or war, they live in peace aside from minor disturbances, there are no arguments over what color the sky is or how green the grass is, they do not know of love therefore they do not fall in love. The committee feels that if people where to posses external memories that they would not be able to live in peace; that people would be in constant fear of one another or people might make the wrong choices in their lives. This is why the Giver and the Receiver are the only ones to posses these memories. “In The Giver, the history of the world is in the mind of one person and must not be shared with society” (Hurst
Jonas, the protagonist, is assigned the job of holding memories for the community. This is so that not everyone has to experience sad or painful memories. The Giver's job is to transmit these memories to Jonas and, in doing so, reveals the wonders of love, and family, and pain, and sorrow to this young boy. Jonas begins to resent the rules of sameness and wants to share these joys with his community. After receiving his first memory, Jonas says, "I wish we had those things, still." (p. 84)
“How could someone not fit in? The community was so meticulously ordered, the choices so carefully made.” (Lowry, 48) In Lowry’s novel, The Giver, eliminating choices and feelings caused their society to be worse than our society today because you don’t have any choices and you don’t get to experience the feeling of joy and happiness.
The Community keeps the memories away from the people, which means that they ignore their past, and cannot gain wisdom or bliss. For example, when the Giver was explaining what memories are to Jonas, he says, “There’s much more… I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future,”(Lowry 78). The Giver describes how wisdom comes in this quote.
“Ignorance is not bliss. Bliss is knowing the full meaning of what you have been given.” said David Levithan. In her dystopian novel, The Giver, Lois Lowry is able to convey the same idea as this quote. In this book, people created the Community in which the members are in a supposedly safe and happy environment. The Elders choose Jonas, the main character, to be the next Receiver of Memory and his training helps him to experience the past and see the deep flaws in the Community.
Sameness is the quality or state of being alike or of not changing. Everyone is same in Jonas’s community. Sameness has both advantages and disadvantages, but more advantages in The Giver by Lois Lowry.
Lois Lowry describes a futuristic world with controlled climate, emotions, way of living and eliminates suffering in her book The Giver. The main character, Jonas, shows the reader what his world is like by explaining a very different world from what society knows today. Everything is controlled, and no one makes choices for themselves or knows of bad and hurtful memories. There is no color, and everything is dull. As he becomes the Receiver who has to know all the memories and pass them down to the next Receiver, he realizes his world needs change. He starts to believe that a world of sameness where no one can decide or make choices for themselves is boring. Lois Lowry is warning readers that living in a world of sameness is not something to create as it is boring and dull, but if the world follows conformity and does not value diversity and difference enough, society could become that of Jonas’s.
So all the memories everyone had from the past has now created a world that is today, enjoyable. “Call me the Giver.” (Lowry 110). Quoted by the only old man who holds all the memories from years and years of the past to give to the new Receiver, which is Jonas. It is not just the happiness of past memories holding on throughout lives. But pain is the biggest part of memory that anyone will have to endure. It is not just the mental pain we suffer through, it also could have a pain in the physical body and mind that the elderly man had to be tortured with throughout his life. Lois Lowry is a powerful writer inflicting and teaching in the minds of all and how most important and delicate memory is in the novel, The Giver, and how it must not be forgotten or fade away as it will determine your future and fill the gaps of mistakes individuals have
Memories that are passed down are things that are normal to us. Memories of sun, snow, pain, and sorrow. The ending of the book is highly controversial and extremely maddening to most people. Lois Lowry has said in an interview that the question of the book is why there even has to be a Giver, and why people have to remember the past, even if it was just one person. She said that creating the Giver was just part of the story and needed some suspense.
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...
society, everyone wears the same clothes, follows the same rules, and has a predetermined life. A community just like that lives inside of Lois Lowry’s The Giver and this lack of individuality shows throughout the whole book. This theme is demonstrated through the control of individual appearance, behavior, and ideas.
It is one of the few brave books that exposes the horrors of humanity and serves as a cautionary tale for us all. Even in a “paradise” like Jonas' community, people still try to control others in order to keep the world pure, innocent, and shaped in their image, while they are ignorant of the past, of history, and their abilities to harm others even when they have good intentions. The Giver is a vital piece of literature for society today; its lessons of the horrors that can occur in society and the beauty that humanity offers are invaluable to us all. Freedom and choice are vital to a successful and fulfilled society. A world without freedom and choice “is a frightening world. Let’s work hard to keep it from truly happening.”
Even though both the society in The Giver by Lois Lowry and modern society are both unique in their own ways, our society is a better society to live in. Our society gives us more freedom to choose for our own benefits and
We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others” (97). In the book The Giver by Lois Lowry, no one has seen a rainbow after a storm, no one knew what colors were; what choosing was; what it meant to be an individual. Everyone lived in complete Sameness, and never learned what it meant to be an individual. By eliminating as much self expression as possible in Sameness and society, Jonas's community has rejected the individuality of a society where people are free to move society forward. In The Giver individuality is represented by colors, memories, and pale eyes.
Jonas hates how his society decides to keep memories a secret from everyone. Jonas says: “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared” (Lowry 154). Jonas feels that memories, whether it be good or bad, should be shared with everyone. Furthermore, memories allow the community to gain wisdom from remembering experiences of the past. As for The Giver, The Giver disagrees with how the community runs things. He believes that memories should be experienced by everyone as well, because life is meaningless without memories. The Giver says: “There are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don’t want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable–so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen [...] It’s just that… without memories, it’s all meaningless. They gave that burden to me” (Lowry 103). The Giver is burdened with the responsibility to not share memories even though that is what he feels the community deserves. In addition, he believes the community lives a very monotonous life where nothing ever changes. Everything is meaningless without memories because the community does not know what it is like to be human without feelings. Overall, Jonas and The Giver’s outlooks on their “utopian” society change as they realize that without
The Giver provides a chance that readers can compare the real world with the society described in this book through some words, such as release, Birthmothers, and so on. Therefore, readers could be able to see what is happening right now in the real society in which they live by reading her fiction. The author, Lowry, might build the real world in this fiction by her unique point of view.