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.
There are many advantages in Jonas’s community for Sameness. One advantage is that no one get jealous, which stops a lot of arguments. If someone gets a choice of something with color which they don’t have, they could argue about a specific color. Also if someone gets a better grade than the person with bad the not good grade, the person with the good grade will get praised and the other one won't.
Not only is there advantages in but there are disadvantages. in Jonas’ community is that people can't be different so they are all the same. They
Despite people have more choice and freedom, for those who do not have a protected society, valuing individual needs, would result a negative effect for the people. So, did the society that Jonas lives in, produce more positive or more negative results? In Lois Lowry’s, The Giver, Jonas’s community has a well-organized society with a very structured and safe life. “I knew that there had been times in the past-terrible times-when people had destroyed others in haste,in fear, and had brought about their own destruction” (48). In the old days, when people in Jonas’s community valued individual needs, there were lots of terrible happenings: violence; and then the society ended up by having general welfare by having safety. It is difficult for us to think of a world without color, freedom, music and love, but in The Giver, the society denounces these things in order to make room for peace and safety. In The Giver, by having a society based on general welfare they gave safety to their people. No violence, no criminal activities nor homicides. In Jonas’s community, everyone has the sameness. Therefore, General welfare leads a society into an outstanding democratic society by giving all the qualities from the
Having the Ability of free will can shape the way we think. When Jonas learns the truth about being released means he chooses to escape the community with Gabriel . In the book when Jonas sees the video of his own father, killing Gabriel’s twin via lethal injection, and throws it down a garbage shoot. When the community elders decide to kill the old for living out his or her lives or babies who are not up to standard is their way of population control. For example in our world capital punishment is a debatable subject and to control the prison population. Weather to kill someone for committing a crime or letting them rot in prison for the rest of their life. Sometimes we do need to take
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. When he turns twelve, his job for the rest of his life is decided as the Receiver. His job is to receive all the memories the previous Receiver has held on to. While this is beneficial for Jonas as he is able to leave the society and his job of the Receiver behind and get freedom, the community is left without someone to take the memories from The Giver.
On the surface, Jonas is like any other eleven-year-old boy living in his community. He seems more intelligent and perceptive than many of his peers, and he thinks more seriously than they do about life, worrying about his own future as well as his friend Asher’s. He enjoys learning and experiencing new things: he chooses to volunteer at a variety of different centers rather than focusing on one, because he enjoys the freedom of choice that volunteer hours provide. He also enjoys learning about and connecting with other people, and he craves more warmth and human contact than his society permits or encourages. The things that really set him apart from his peers—his unusual eyes, his ability to see things change in a way that he cannot explain—trouble him, but he does not let them bother him too much, since the community’s emphasis on politeness makes it easy for Jonas to conceal or ignore these little differences. Like any child in the community, Jonas is uncomfortable with the attention he receives when he is singled out as the new Receiver, preferring to blend in with his friends.
Even though the community does benefit from Sameness, there are some things it is deprived of. While color is not absolutely necessary for the proper functioning of a society, it is still something important that this community lacks. “The red was so beautiful” (Lowry 95). This quote shows that once Jonas is exposed to color, he realizes how beautiful and important they are. Whenever he sees rare flashes of red, he gets excited and likes it. After being able to experience color, he looks at th...
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
Even if it's as small as choosing what color shirt to wear, he wanted the ability to choose. The community feared that if people were able to make choices, Sameness and control would be lost. They feared the idea of people's choices impacting others and disturbing the peace. The community made a very precise choice when they chose Jonas to be The Giver. However would they have chosen him if they knew his choices would impact the community? The choices Jonas made reflected the kind of person and citizen he was in the community.
Jonas gets access to many things in his community.For instance, Jonas’s rules said “You may lie.”(65)Jonas was allowed to lie to other people if he did not want to answer truthfully.One detail from the text is ”You may ask any question of any citizen and you will receive answers.” (65)Jonas could ask any question to any person he wanted and would get an answer no matter what.The author stated that “There must have been hundreds-perhaps thousands- of books, their titles embossed in shiny letters.” (71)Jonas has access to all the books in the annex room, unlike the other people in his community.For example ”The training required of you involves pain.”(59)The training has pain, but it’s so that the rest of the community doesn’t have to experience it.
Jonas changes the community for two reasons. One reason is to help himself and the other reason is to help the community. Jonas helps change the community by making an escape plan so he could leave the community. As a result of escaping the community Jonas would release the memories he was given throughout his lessons to the community. Giving the memories to the community would mean he would be giving them feelings and memories of differences, war, etc., which they don’t have. By leaving the community Jonas helps himself because he escapes the community so he could experience more feelings and live in a society that has differences, no climate control, and color. In conclusion this is how Jonas plans to change the
But it was, of course, against the rules." (pg. 12) Even though he is reluctant to tell his feelings because they are complicated and might make his parents worry, Jonas tells them because he knows and feels the rules are important because he has been educated to think they are just a normal part of everyone's life because everyone follows them, and no one disobeys, as a result of not knowing another way of life. His parents were educated this way and everyone in the community has been because it enforces order and makes sure no one disagrees with the way of the Community. Jonas could just hide his feelings so he wouldn't have to tell them, but he decides to anyway because he feels the rules are necessary and important to life in the community. Another time Jonas feels the rules are important is
The sameness is what makes it that colony. In the novel, it emphasizes, “ He looked down at himself, at the colorless fabric of his clothing. But it’s all the same, always” (97). Mirrors let you look at yourself and regard things about yourself. In the place that they live they took away the color to form everyone the same, the people physically cannot be any other way. After that it says, “Life here is so orderly so predictable--so painless” (103). Thus in this life it is said that life in this society is superior and stable. The people never starve or ever feel pain. It is wonderful they do not have poverty since they are given everything they need and they work to keep the district going. Though they never experienced the actual world before and once they do, will they still love this place? As the text states “We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others. We shouldn’t have!” (95). Immediately upon Jonas caught a glimpse of the evident earth he thought that it might have been better even with such frequent potential risks and so much evil, it is the way we learn to do things ourselves. Even though we are unique, it is not fair to anybody that we cannot be who we
Tones of gray are all I see. Movement of the floor is the alarm that stirs me awake. It goes off at 4:00 am every morning, every day. Heading down a marble staircase in a washed out grey cardigan that everyone wears daily, I grab of what is called an apple and bite into it. An announcement always goes off throughout the day as a reminder, an event coming up, or a warning to the citizens. People watch us with cameras, it’s their jobs to track everyone’s movement since the day you were born to the day you die. Soldiers patrol around so no one can become disobedient. Life is perfect, no mistakes are made. Then one day I realized this lifestyle is unfair. How is it unfair if everything is perfect? Sameness is a rule that is unreasonable and the lack of privacy since we are monitored.
The sincere awareness of colors is not only forgotten, but dismissed into mere memories, and consigned into oblivion. Jonas, after gaining the awareness of colors, comes to the conclusion of wanting the choices that he could make in his daily routine. “I want to decide things! A blue tunic, or a red one?” (97). After The Giver asks Jonas why it is not fair that nothing has color, Jonas realizes that, for him, color is not just an nature. It also represents a level of individual freedom and choice that he has never known in his rigidly controlled society. This forces Jonas to face the disadvantages of living in such a community where self-expression is stifled. Jonas is talking about the sameness in the community and how he has to wear the same, old gray tunic. The Giver points out that choice is at the heart of the matter; when you can’t choose, it makes life very dull. “It’s the choosing that’s important” (98). Because the world in which Jonas has grown up has no color, the appearance of color in the story is important and meaningful. Color represents Jonas’s want for more individual expression. Colors brighten in a special way and Jonas, coming fro...
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