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Analyze the giver
The giver literary essay
Three similarities between today's society and the givers society
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If people lived in a world of sameness would they be content? Most people would probably answer no but if they were born in a place where sameness was normal then maybe they would think different. The people that live in the community in The Giver, by Louis Lowry, are in that situation exactly. These people are raised in a world without color, music, choices, landscape, weather, holidays, and most feelings. Jonas, the eleven year old protagonist, is completely satisfied with his life in the community until he receives his assignment. He soon realizes how much everyone is missing out on in their everyday lives.
The one huge thing the community lacks is choice. They do have some choices, like getting a family unit and signing up for release. But they don’t have any important decisions to make throughout their lives. The community has a group of Elders that make the call on everything that happens within the community. So the citizens never become independent in a way that we would recognize. The result of not having choices is sameness, and after Jonas becomes the Receiver he starts t...
“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 with general welfare and 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.
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.
Citizens are engineered to never be alone, which removes responsibility and the need for family bonds, showing that independent thinking is replaced with the ideology of world leaders. Since technology has removed the ability to reproduce for citizens, this removes responsibility, allowing a person to act impulsively and create meaningless relationships which leads to unethical decisions. Likewise, in the Giver family units are preplanned and are limited to two children by the elders of society. When Jonas asks his father if he loved him, the father replies, saying, "I enjoy you. " The society is very structured and strict which shows that the bonds with family are insignificant as they have to speak with restrictions and not allowed to freely express any emotions.
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. Once Jonas begins his training with the Giver, however, the tendencies he showed in his earlier life—his sensitivity, his heightened perceptual powers, his kindness to and interest in people, his curiosity about new experiences, his honesty, and his high intelligence—make him extremely absorbed in the memories the Giver has to transmit. In turn, the memories, with their rich sensory and emotional experiences, enhance all of Jonas’s unusual qualities. Within a year of training, he becomes extremely sensitive to beauty, pleasure, and suffering, deeply loving toward his family and the Giver, and fiercely passionate about his new beliefs and feelings. Things about the community that used to be mildly perplexing or troubling are now intensely frustrating or depressing, and Jonas’s inherent concern for others and desire for justice makes him yearn to make changes in the community, both to awaken other people to the richness of life and to stop the casual cruelty that is practiced in the community.
The Giver presents a community that appears to be perfect on the surface. Jonas's community is free of warfare, pain, sorrow and other bitterness we suffer in our society. The world seems to be secure and undergoes little conflict. Such a community seems flawless and is the idealistic society that we longed to live in. However, through Jonas's training, the imperfections of the Utopian community are revealed.
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.
One literary element that is cleverly written into the novel is irony. Jonas’ life is supposedly perfect, in an environment with everyone’s life controlled and documented by the Elders. The weather, the marriages, the child selection, the population, and the education are decided by the Elders. Even the career is provided for them; each December at the Ceremony of 12, the new recruits receive the career that they will continue with for the rest of their working adult life’s’. The job Jonas receives is the most difficult one, the Receiver, who has the duty of containing all of the intense experiences of life. Ironically, Jonas doesn’t enjoy this; he instead feels that the job is too painful for him. Yet the Elders’ decisions, although chosen w...
In the text, “‘Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished sunshine and did away with differences.’” After The Giver said that, Jonas started getting feisty and starting asking of questions about why we changed to sameness. There it shows that he is actually understanding the concept of how we changed so no one could be different and everything would be the same. He started to understand that everyone was different and everyone could chose their own lives and families. He started
The community in The Giver is definitely a utopian society. The town, surrounding structures, and people of the community have very few flaws which make them cold, calculating, and logical. The people of the community cannot comprehend feelings, which makes the community’s value worthless in the eyes of someone who can remember and feel emotion such as the reader, The Giver, and Jonas. For all the other inhabitants, the community is a place where they hardly ever feel pain, or anything that can cause them harm in any form( both mental and physical ) .The community was made into a paradise by taking away emotion and choice, thus creating non-feeling, color-blind, shells of what former humans once were.
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.”
Life would be so much different if people did not have the ability to make decisions on their own. In the Giver, a twelve-year-old boy named Jonas does not have the option on who he marries and is not related to his parents or the future children he has. All of those selections are made for him. Even the decision on when he dies is made for him. The biggest differences between Jonas society and modern day society are family, death, and marriage.
The story in The Giver by Lois Lowry takes place in a community that is not normal. People cannot see color, it is an offense for somebody to touch others, and the community assigns people jobs and children. This unnamed community shown through Jonas’ eye, the main character in this novel, is a perfect society. There is no war, crime, and hunger. Most readers might take it for granted that the community in The Giver differs from the real society. However, there are several affinities between the society in present day and that in this fiction: estrangement of elderly people, suffering of surrogate mothers, and wanting of euthanasia.
The people in the community have absolutely no choices what so ever. The people already have their whole life rolled out in front of you without even knowing it. The council chooses your spouse, your family unit, your job, what you do everyday and how to do everything everyday. The rules that Jonas gets restrict him from doing certain things. “1. Go immediately at the end
Community Jonas lives could be described as a perfect society. The move starts in black and white, making everyone look the same, and confirming that differences were not allowed. There were no losers or winners and words like fear, pain, envy, and