THE GIVER Safety and sameness are important, but not as important as creativity and freedom of actions. In Lois Lowry's book The Giver, Jonas, a boy who is chosen to be The Receiver, is wondering the same thing. When Jonas is chosen to be The Receiver he is stunned and scared of the knowledge he will obtain. While Jonas is collecting knowledge from The Giver, we in our own society are pondering over our own freedoms. In The Giver there is no freedom of choice, there is no fun, you have your assigned job and you are assigned your family. Jonas has been assigned with the job of The Receiver of all memories. He can't tell his family what he did, he can't request a release and he can't request to have any medical assistance. In our society we have freedom of choice to select our job, we can be whatever we like. There are no job assignments like there is in The Giver, you can start your own business or you can work for someone if you wish. You also have the right to quit your job if you didn't like it, but in The Giver once you have your job you can't change. In my...
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)
The first reason why the community in the book The Giver should be given personal rights is because the inhabitants of the community could learn from their mistakes. Without any personal rights they cannot make their own decisions; if they don’t make their own decisions they cannot learn from their mistakes that their decisions had led them to. On page 98 in The Giver Jonas stated that “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?” This tells the reader...
Jonas decides to leave and change the lives of his people so that they can experience the truth. “The Giver rubbed Jonas’s hunched shoulders… We’ll make a plan” (155). Their plan involves leaving sameness and heading to Elsewhere, where Jonas knows the memories can be released to the people. He has a connection with Gabe, a special child who has experienced the memories, unlike the rest of the community. Jonas has a strong love for Gabe, and he longs to give him a better life. “We’re almost there, Gabriel” (178). Even with a sprained ankle, Jonas keeps pushing forward because he wants everyone to experience what The Giver has given him. He wants them to have a life where the truth is exposed. His determination allows him to make a change for a greater future in his community. This proves that Jonas has the strength to change his community for the
... choice. This made me think in a different perspective and showed me the ups and downs of this society. Lois Lowry shows the importance of individuality, choices and memory in a perspective that really helped me understand how we take some things for granted.
The Giver: Analysis of Jonas 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.
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.”
In both The Truman Show and the Giver both of their communities are controlled. In The Truman Show, Truman's whole life is controlled by everyone around him. All of these choices are made for him and what everyone says is told to them. Jonas is life is also planned out for him, and all of these choices are as well. Both characters lives are controlled by a higher power but when they figure out about the higher powers control on them they try to break free. Even though one of them left for the truth in the other for a better life, they both leave for love.
...wined into her writing the answer becomes clear. Society has boundaries and limits that are acknowledged should not be crossed. Yet humans have a craving to do so. Each time the fine line between acceptable and inappropriate is crossed, a new boundary is created; therefore a new crave develops and the cycle never ends. The Giver takes place after the last limit was broken, when the Elders took away some of the most beautiful pleasures of life, and the last line was drawn with all memories of freedom stored away. And this storage happens to be a human mind, the Giver, passing it down to the next Reciever into conceivably the end of time. Jonas disagrees; the memories he has seen, the pain he has endured, the beauty he has experienced must be shared. He wants the whole world to know the full extent and intention of life that God created. The boundary must be crossed.
Jonas’ community chooses Sameness rather than valuing individual expression. Although the possibility of individual choice sometimes involves risk, it also exposes Jonas to a wide range of joyful experiences from which his community has been shut away. Sameness may not be the best thing in the community because Jonas expresses how much he feels like Sameness is not right and wants there to be more individuality. Giver leads him to understand both the advantages and the disadvantages of personal choice, and in the end, he considers the risks worth the benefits. “Memories are forever.”
Plot of The Giver The main character, Jonas, is part of a society with enforced sameness. This is achieved by removing every memory of a time before the sameness begun. Jonas is assigned as the new receiver of memory when he becomes a twelve, and the previous receiver, now the Giver, transmits the memories to Jonas. As his training goes on Jonas wants to make a difference, he wants everyone to see color and feel love like he does, which was the Giver’s intention.
In the Giver, Jonas is faced with many new and unusual experiences. The first of his experiences starts during the Ceremony of Twelve, when the chief elder is giving all the new Twelves their assignments, they skip over Jonas. At the end of the ceremony it is revealed that Jonas had not been assigned, but instead he was “chosen.” On his first day Jonas meets the Giver, and recieves his first memory. As weeks go by the Giver and Jonas get to know each other, one day Jonas asks the Giver about the previous receiver-in-training.
The Giver is about a boy named Jonas who was chosen to be the community’s next Receiver of Memory. He lived in a community where everything was chosen for the citizens, and everything was perfect. During Jonas' training, he realized that the community was missing something and that there was more in the world. Jonas wanted everybody to know that. The Giver book was then made into a movie. Though the two were based with the same story plot, there are three important differences that results with two different takes on the same story. The three main differences between the book and the movie are Asher and Fiona's Assignments, the similarity all Receivers had, and the Chief Elder's role.
The movie, The Giver, is better than the book because it contains more action than the book describes and it’s very exciting and intense. Everything about the movie was perfectly put together which made the movie a great one to watch. There is also a moral to the movie which I think is “Stand up for what you believe in.” I think this is a great moral and goes well with the movie because it shows that even if the whole world turns on you, as long as you believe in yourself, you can achieve almost anything. I also like the fact that it’s a futuristic kind of movie; it makes it unique. The movie not only makes you feel a certain way; but it also makes you think about how our world would be if we did not have the gift of choice-making. The Giver
The first way The Giver is a dystopian novel is that information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted. This is an important characteristic of a dystopian novel when the government doesn’t let citizens have independent thought or freedom. This quality is clearly displayed is the novel when it is stated that the society wouldn’t “…dare to let people make choices of their own” (124). This shows an obvious restriction of independent thought from the citizens in society in The Giver. The resistance to allowing people to make their own decisions is demonstrated when the Committee of Elders chooses people’s jobs for them and decides who every person will be partnered with. These are both prime examples of how independent thought and freedom