The Giver by: Derrick Bell
In the book The Giver by Lois Lowry, a boy named Jonas learned about the lessons of originality. His world is very different from ours. Our world has color, religion, and freedom, but Jonas’s world doesn’t. Two themes that apply to my life and The Giver are “Originality is important” and “Freedom is just as important as security.”
The biggest theme in The Giver is “Originality is important.” Everyone in the story is the same except Jonas and the Giver. Jonas and the Giver are original; they are different from everyone else. Jonas is learning qualities and the fun of life while everyone else has to be the same.Jonas’s friends, Asher and Fiona, are learning their place in the world. Asher had originality when he was a child, but as he grew older he started to conform to the rules of the community. Fiona tried to conform to the rules of the community, but Jonas showed her how to have fun and how to learn to love. No one gets to celebrate a birthday on the day that they were born. No one is taken care of by a biological family. Everyone is assigned to family units and the people in these units have no relation to one another. There is also a ceremony of release where people get lethal injections. Everyone has a specific job in the community. The people in Jonas’s community are missing out on important parts of life because they do not have originality.
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I don't use other people's ideas. I like to be different. I also think about creating things in the future that don’t exist now. In the past, people who thought originality was important, used their creativity to make airplanes for quick travel so people could get around the world easier. I think that this originality could help me create things that could make life better for people in the
Sameness and difference, is one of the themes Lois Lowry portrays in “The Giver”. The theme of sameness and difference plays a key part in Jonas’s life, and contributes to the people in his community, and their past as well.
The main theme shown in The Giver is the idea that good cannot exist without evil, and evil cannot exist without good, thus making reaching a perfect society impossible. It does not matter how amazing an experience is, unless you have something bad to compare it with you can never taste the true meaning of that moment. The members of Jonas’s community cannot appreciate the joys in their lives because they have never felt sadness. Correspondingly, they also do not feel grief because they have never appreciated the true wonders of life. Throughout the novel, Lois Lowry uses multiple literary devices to conjure these thoughts into the readers mind.
Set in a community with no climate, emotions, choices, or memories Lois Lowry tells the tale of Jonas in The Giver. Jonas is selected to be the receiver of memory, which means the memories of generations past, before the community was created, will all be transferred to him to hold. As Jonas receives memories his concept of the world around him drastically changes. Jonas starts out as twelve-year-old boy with perceptions different from those around him, he then begins to see the community for what it really is, and he makes a plan to change it.
The Giver describes a society in search of perfection, which is a recurring theme in literature. Somebody in Jonas’s society decided that eliminating or limiting choices and feeling, among other things, would ultimately create a perfect place in which to live. By eliminating and/or limiting choices and feelings, the creators were able to implement Sameness, which would then provide a conflict-less environment in which to exist.
Imagine having everything you wished for. You would live in a perfect world. But every world has imperfections and you come across to realizing...a perfect world doesn’t exist. Within time, you come from an illusion to reality. You choose your journey and it starts here. The community is a separate environment from the world and has many rules to live by. The rules can vary to be severe consequences. It includes sameness, no memories, and family unit regulations. The kids end their childhood at the age of 12 by receiving their life assignment. The main character, Jonas is chosen to be the receiver of memory. He is reliable to hold everyone's feelings, hopes, and devotions. In The Giver the author Lois Lowry uses the theme of change to reveal that growing up in “the community” is a non-stressful and organized environment but Jonas finds the real world a whole different place when he receives memories about strong feelings and hardships, intellects the word “love”, and how important it is to be an individual.
The novel, The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is an everlasting story that shows the importance of individuality. This novel is about a young boy named Jonas who was elected as the Receiver of Memories, a person who is given the memories from the world that existed before their current society, Sameness. In this society there is no individualism. People can not choose who to marry, or what they want to do for a living. Over time Jonas becomes more and more wise, and realizes that the supposedly perfect community actually has some very dark and negative aspects. The author, Lois Lowry is a 76-year-old writer who focuses her writing on helping struggling teenagers become individuals. Lowry had a very tragic childhood. After both of her parents were
The giver by Lois Lowry was an interesting book to say the least. In the beginning you are lead to believe these are normal kids and characters, possibly in the future, but in pretty much the same state of mind as our definition of “human” today. As the book goes on, you are slowly let in on details, like the characters can not see color, and that the parents are not biological parents, and everything is organized and decided for the characters in the book. The author did a great job of slowly bringing us into the world of sameness quite the same way the giver slowly brought Jonas into the world of memories. I believe the subject of the book is the Importance of the Individual. As corny as it sounds, we spend much of our life trying to be just like everyone else. I think Lois Lowry wrote this entire novel just to show how horrible it would be if everyone was the same as everyone else.
The setting of The Giver is bleak and lackluster, portraying everyone and everything as the same. There are no differences or any uniqueness. All of the families have the same amount of people in their household. For example, the book describes families as “two children-one male, one female- to each family unit. It was written very clearly in the rules” (11). People dress, speak, and even think similarly. With the strict rules the town makes force everyone to be the same. The citizens have to talk in a certain way or they will get punished. The girls cannot do their hair differently than others. Children are not allowed to ride bicycles until they turn nine years old. The
The theme conveyed through the Giver is that individuality should be valued. The story takes place in a utopian society where everything is the same. There are no choices, no color, and no love in the Community of Sameness. The novel starts out a month before the Ceremony of Twelve, where the 12 year olds each get assigned a job. Jonas gets the assignment of the Receiver of Memory, and he soon finds out that lying is permitted, and receives several memories of the past without sameness, with pain too. He has the ability to see beyond, and finds out that he and the Giver are the only people in the Community that have the ability to see, as well as hear beyond. Similar to the phenomenon of an apple changing quality and his friend Fiona’s hair doing the same
Imagine living in a world with no individuality. Everyone would be limited to a degree of “sameness”. As a result, humans would lack the ability to love, to feel emotions, and to imagine. The world would essentially be filled with one shared mind; there would be no opinions, no choices, and no awareness that your mind was even being constrained what so ever. In her book “The Giver”, Louis Lowry exposes the dangers of the lack of individuality in a Utopian Society.
The Giver is about a young boy of twelve named Jonas who lives in a utopian/dystopian future in which everything is “perfect” and controlled by something called “Sameness.” There is no color, no music, no anything that creates individuality. When Jonas is chosen to receive the memories of the past from a person called the Giver, he begins to see what society has lost and learns dark secrets about what officials do to keep it that way. At the end of the novel, Jonas runs away with an unusual child named Gabriel, who is marked for death, in an attempt to share his newly found memories with the world and find the place called “Elsewhere.” “The majority of the bans on this book are because of children issues instead of grown up ones.
How would it feel if this world didn’t let people have choices, didn’t let people share, or if they didn’t let people celebrate birthdays, holidays, or just celebrate anything? Well that’s what it was like for Jonas in The Giver. Jonas lives in the future in a community where The Giver is the only one who knows everything, but soon all that changed for Jonas. He became the the community 's new Receiver of Memory, and soon Jonas learns the terrible secrets of this “utopian” community. Later on as he learns some more about the community’s secrets he makes a plan to leave the community, and to take Gabe with him so he wouldn’t get released.(which means they die, but the community doesn’t understand that) In this book choices, sharing, and celebrations would have made The Giver community more positive.
The theme of The Giver by Lois is growing up is a challenge for everyone because Jonas struggles throughout the story when he is faced with adult problems and how to become more mature. In The Giver, Lois Lowry writes, “His childhood, his friendships, his carefree sense of security -- all of those seemed to be slipping away.” As Jonas becomes older and matures, his friends and childhood memories are starting to fade away as he becomes an adult. This supports that the theme is growing up is a challenge for everyone, because at one point in our lives, we all have trouble growing up and taking on more responsibility. According to The Giver by
Through our society we are all raised up to be independent and unique individuals such as being ourselves and expressing who each of us are to the world. However, in the book The Giver by Lois Lowry, everyone is raised to count on one another and everyone must look and act the same. Our society differs from Jonas’s in many ways, such as the family units, birthdays, and the way we each learn about our past.
When you get a chance at freedom you take it, no matter what the circumstances are. In The Giver by Lois Lowry a boy named Jonas is selected to be the Receiver of Memories. In Jonas’s community everything is the same and everyone is raised to be the same. And as Jonas receives more and more memories about the past his opinion of his community begin to change. In an act to do what is right Jonas begins to do things that are not allowed. And in the one act, the biggest and baddest one of all Jonas sacrifices his safety for his freedom to be and see what he wants to. Lowry conveys the theme that freedom is worth sacrificing safety through Jonas’s actions and Jonas’s leaving at the end.