Can you imagine a world where every one of your decisions is made for you, yet people still call it a perfect world? This is the world Jonas has lived in all of his life. This is also why I say he lives in a dystopian society. According to Utopia and Dystopia, a dystopian society is a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding. I say this is a dystopian society because the community controls the members feelings, how they see things such as color, and even your family and who all is in it. In, The Giver, the community controls emotions by giving people a pill to take every day. The pill controls hormones, or what the community calls “stirrings”. This is also how the community controls the population.
To me a utopia cannot be achieved, a utopia would be “perfect world” where everyone is satisfied. A dystopia can be very far from perfect, as it is in The Giver. The world in The Giver by Lois Lowry is a dystopia because no world anywhere can ever be perfect, the people who live there will never be truly happy and because without choice life can be very boring, as it is in The Giver.
Jonas is the protagonist of the novel and a third-person narrator tells the entire story from Jonas perception of things. He is intelligent, curious, caring, and his thought process is very mature for being 11-13 years old. A good quote portraying both his matureness and his intellect is “If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things”(97). This is also one of the first signs that he is displeased with the community. Another quote showing his courage and curiosity is "It hurt a lot," Jonas said, "but I'm glad you gave it to me. It was interesting. And now I understand better. What it meant, that there would be
Jonas’ community appears to be a utopia, but, in reality, it is a dystopia. The people seem perfectly content to live in an isolated wreck—in a government run by a select few—in which a group of Elders enforces the rules. In Jonas’ community, there is no poverty, starvation, unemployment, lack of housing, or discrimination; everything is perfectly planned to eliminate any problems. However, as the book progresses and Jonas gains insight into what the people have willingly given up—their freedoms and individualities—for the so-called common good of the community, it becomes more and more obvious that the community is a horrible place in which to live. You as a reader can relate to the disbelief and horror that Jonas feels when he realizes
The result is, as praised by Jonas’ family unit, that the decisions the Elders make are never incorrect or unsuitable. They seem omniscient, and this strengthens their claim to power, their right to make decisions for the whole community as they are excellent at it. As has been shown above, the novel contains various forms of oppression. In order for “people” to express their individuality and humanity, freedom of choice is essential. Dehumanization is observed in The Giver’s society, and life within the communities becomes deformed, manipulated, and far from being a utopia. Infact, due to all the dehumanization, fear, surveillance and inequality shown in this society, it now strongly resembles dystopian one.
Jonas discovers what is really beyond his community, beyond all the rules and policies they have to follow; he decides to leave and give all of his memories to the rest of the community so they would know about what they have not seen or experienced before. Jonas discovers that the community has decided too many things for everyone. He realizes Sameness is not right, that it cannot last any longer. He thinks of all the what-ifs. What if the Elders choose a wrong spouse? What if the Elders choose the wrong job for someone?
The Giver is considered as a dystopian society because everyone is under the illusion that there is freedom. An example of this is when the text states, “you're ready for the pills, that's all. That’s the treatment for the stirrings.” They can't even have independent thoughts. Medication is given to prevent
To most kids in our society, the changes in Jonas’s world would be difficult to accept because we in America value our freedom to choose and to voice our desires. Did the creator’s of Jonas’s community truly improve society as we know it today?
One reason why Jonas hates this community is because of the rules. If you make one small mistake, you can get in serious trouble, also known as being released (killed). “ When an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice….Needless to say, he will be released.” (pg. 13) This suggests that the rules in the society can have a major impact on someone if they make just a slight error. The fact that the person did not follow the directions well enough and got killed is appalling. These unpleasant and ridiculous rules support a dystopian novel because they show how unpleasant living in this community can be.
Individuality is one of the key components of reaching the utopian standard. However, in The Giver, the community rejects the idea of individuality and instead focuses on developing Sameness, therefore initiating a form of control by allowing them to not express their own personality to shine, and alternately forcing them to contort into these soft putty-shaped beings with zero individuality at all. Conversations between Jonas and The Giver that occur throughout the novel informs the audience that the community lacks a sense of uniqueness and results in an absence of options to choose from.
The Giver strives to be a utopian society but the still can’t be perfect. The Giver is a book with the main character being Jonas, Jonas has no last name; however, no one else had the last name in their society. The Giver is a Dystopian because they get their memories erased, they are all equal, and they get assigned jobs when they are 12.
“Your self-worth is determined by you, you don’t have to depend on someone telling you who you are”- quoted by the singer beyoncé.
If you think about a dystopian society and a Modern day society how are they alike and different? A dystopian society has a lot of violence but as for a modern society it doesn't. According to the book of the Giver by Lowry, A boy named Jonas lives, in a dystopian society that's not perfect but called perfect. May reflect your opinion or judgement. Answers the prompt To end this paragraph, I disagree about the people who are in control in jonas society,that are saying their society is perfect.
In The Giver by Lois Lowry, Jonas sees his community as the perfect place, but is it really? This essay the author will explain how Jonas live is a dystopic society. One reason this community is not perfect, is because they don’t have feelings or don’t understand them that well. In the story Jonas received a memory of love, he realized what love is, and he also realized that he loved Fiona, Asher, Mom, Dad, Lily, and The Giver. The problem was that when Jonas went home afterward he asked his parents if they loved him, they replied with “we enjoy you” or “ we are proud of your accomplishment” they said that love was a meaningless word.
Jenny He Mr. Fields MYP English Acquisition 8 Mar.20/2017 Is the society presented in The Giver closer to a utopia or dystopia? “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
You could argue that this book is a dystopia because they aren’t free and can’t make their own choice but the problem is a lot of the time we choose wrong and it affects our whole life. For example, what happens if someone choose to not go to college and end up working at a fast food restaurant for half of their life. Then they can’t support their family if they were even lucky enough to have one without a descent job and they could end up going to college when their 40 or 50 trying to get a descent job. Be honest though no one wants to do that. In Jonas’s community people watch over other people and assign what they think is the right job for them for the rest of their lives and not have to worry about putting food on the table