The Giver By Lois Lowry: Character Analysis

There are so many differences the world over: weather, trees, animals, people, and even the soil beneath our feet changes as we move from one place to the next. What if these distinct deviations vanished from this planet? In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, variances are hard to come by. The founders of the community took away memories of certain privileges that people had and memories of colors; nearly everything is the same. It is my belief that we should celebrate differences, and Lois Lowry shows this in her writing by having the main character, Jonas, show excitement when his world goes from blatantly nondescript to satisfyingly colorful. Divergence from ordinary thinking should be honored; the vast array of visible colors should be appreciated.

“...[Jonas and the Giver] had talked and talked…. It was possible, what they had planned” (Lowry 155). In this segment, Jonas and the Giver—the only forward-thinking individuals to be found in their area—put their heads together to find a way for Jonas to evade living the remainder of his life in his deceptively benign community. Lowry shows how dependent we are on each other’s feedback by having Jonas collaborate with the Giver to make a plot for Jonas’s flight from the community. Knowing the importance of different opinions is paramount for our understanding of each other and learning our particular places in society. If we have the same interests and the same thoughts, we will have the same place in society; as a result, many places will be left empty, leaving holes in the structure of our society. “‘This is the time when we acknowledge differences. You… have spent all your years till now learning to fit in, to standardize your behavior, to curb any impulse that might set you apart from the group’” (Lowry 51-52). In this community, adults teach

“Jonas learned, through memories, the names of colors; and now he began to see them all, in his ordinary life…. The Giver told him that it would be a very long time before he had the colors to keep” (Lowry 97). At this point in the story, Jonas sees things that he has never seen before; when the founders established the community, they forced the people to relinquish memories of the past, color among those memories. Frustrated at his inability to retain the colors for extended periods of time, Jonas exhibits the value that Lois Lowry places in colors and the distinction that they place between individual items. To me, colors make the world ultimately more beautiful to look at; moreover, when the sky changes color or when the leaves change color, a whole spectrum of hues burst into sight, making the examination of natural wonders all the more exhilarating. Of course, if we could not see all of the different colors, we would not miss them because we would not even be able to imagine what they looked like. If you could see a color that is invisible to the rest of the human race, it would have more significance to you, but you would not be able to describe it to someone who has never seen anything like it before. Such was the situation that Jonas was in after seeing new colors through