The Giver Analysis

“Life here is so orderly, so predictable-so painless. It's what they've chosen” (Lowry 103). Imagine a world with no control over who you marry, what your job is, what you wear, or what you get to eat for every meal. This is what it’s like in The Giver by Lois Lowry. The people live in a community that is severely more controlled than ours. We have the freedom to have a pet, have as many kids as you want, and say what you want. The people in The Giver do not have those freedoms. The people in the community don’t even know what love is. In our world love is each individual’s choice, but not in The Giver. In other words, they don’t get to experience the precious parts of life, such has having a wedding and giving birth to your child. No society is perfect, but citizens of every community have an

    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.

“’Memories are forever”’ (Lowry). People make new memories every day without even realizing it. Some good some bad, that’s just the way of life, but in The Giver nobody knows what happened before them. People barley remember what their childhood was like, they don’t understand the importance of memory and that memories are forever. Aspects of life, rules, and prosperities between our world and Jonas’ world are very different yet have some similarities. Things that are crucial to the characters in The Giver are not as meaningful to the people in our world.

     This book is about a boy names Jonas. Jonas lives in a futuristic society where there is no pain, fear, war, and hatred. There is also no prejudice, since everyone looks and acts basically the same, there is very little competition. They have also eliminated choice.

In the Giver, oppression is crystal clear and none of the community’s citizens are aware of it. Having never known anything else, they are inattentive to what they are missing out, and thus appear to be happy. The oppression is not physical but exclusively psychological and appears to stem from a real concern for the

The setting of The Giver takes place in a fictional community known as the “Sameness”. Life here is supposed to be "perfect" because there is no pain or suffering. They don’t have to take

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.

Nevertheless, the community featured in The Giver does not allow its citizens to feel love. The community sacrificed the feeling of love to spare its citizens the pain and warfare that comes along with it. Although this may seem like a good idea, the feeling of love is one that should not be taken away because it further isolates the only people in the community that can feel it. As conveyed in the novel, “Jonas trudged to the bench beside the Storehouse and sat down, overwhelmed with feelings of loss… He had felt such love for Asher and for Fiona. But they could not feel it back” (Lowry 135). Jonas feels alone because only he can feel love for the people in his life, but they will never feel that same love for him in response. Another event that further intensifies Jonas’s feeling of loss and confusion is when he asks his parents if they loved him, and they blatantly say that love is a meaningless word (Lowry 127). This deeply hurts Jonas because he knows what the feeling of love truly is and he does not believe that it is useless, as his parents do. Knowing that his parents do not “love” him as he loves them, Jonas is further isolated and misunderstood. These negative emotions that Jonas is feeling are not emotions that a citizen of a utopia should be feeling, considering that a utopia should be a happy place without any negative feeling. In addition, love is a feeling that is valued by the Giver, as the Giver’s

Would you want to live in a world where there is no choice and mild feelings? Can you imagine a world where everything is decided for you, and you are irrelevant? This is the way that the community in The Giver is run; it is called sameness. Sameness is not a good way to live, because you can learn from your mistakes, difference can be a good thing, and there is no reason to live without choice. One reason Sameness is not a good way to live is that with sameness people cannot make any bad decisions.

In the novel, The Giver, by Lois Lowry, the topic of life occurs throughout the story. Jonas lives in a community based on conformity and sameness. Jonas is chosen as the receiver of memory. As he is trained he learns that change is needed in the community. At the end of the book, Jonas tries to go elsewhere to return the memories back to the community. In The Giver, the author uses the characters, plot, and conflict to develop the theme that life can not be taken for granted.

It makes the world seem utopian. Without emotions, no one feels hurt. Without individuality, nothing bad can happen. However, this is the farthest from the truth. The Giver is a lot worse than the society in 2015, because of the “releases” that happen, and the fact that their society eliminates all choices.

We a learning that, due to all the eliminations of senses, feelings and creation of equality between every individual in the society, it's creating a new and harder way for the inhabitants to accept and open up to new memories and emotions that they have been faced with. In the Givers community, this is one aspect that

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared. (Lowry, Goodreads). In other words it’s saying the pain Jonas is feeling is mental and emotional but not physical. The giver is making Jonas feel these memories and they're coming back to his head. And by sharing memories it lets you get help or makes you feel good because people can help you. My Thesis is comparing and contrasting modern day to the Giver.

The Giver shows us that love is an essential part to this world. The Giver shows Jonas the memory of pain and suffering and reacted in a way that made him upset, expressing love to Jonas as well as regret. Jonas was “no longer enjoying the freedom but instead, terrified…”(137). The Giver knows what Jonas is experiencing and regrets it although it is what he is told to do. The Giver took a liking to Jonas but couldn’t bare to watch him in pain. Jonas sacrificed his own comfort so the Giver could be relieved of these memories for himself. These same memories were given to the Giver because it was his job. The Giver of each generation feels love toward the new Receiver because the Giver knows what pain is like. Love is essential in this moment, especially for Jonas, because he needs a person to help him to start a new, more utopian society. People show love by sacrificing themselves for

Written in 1993 by Lois Lowery, the Giver is a futuristic dystopian novel based on a young boy named Jonas. The Elders granted Jonas the tremendous burden of carrying the weight of generations of memories: good and evil. The book purely relies on Jonas' inner struggles and thoughts alone to develop characters and the plot. The killer angels rely deeply on the circulation of characters fighting in the battle of Gettysburg and their point of view. Would changing the point of view affect the development of the stories? It is my personal opinion that if the point of view changed, the change could help further the plot.