The Giver Response Essay

“’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”, written by Lois Lowry, one of the major theme’s is “sameness”, which effects very deeply the life of citizens in the community based on perfection.Sameness in somewhere just as this community, can either cause disadvantages or advantages at the same time, also including the loss of diversity.

"It was your first Stirrings...you're ready for the pills.'....he swallowed the pill...the feelings had disappeared. The Stirrings were gone." (37-39) This quote shows that there are no feelings in this society. The Elders make the citizens take pills to subdue their feelings. "Love. It was a word and concept new to him." (125) When Jonas is given the memory of love, he interpreted the feeling and repeated the word to himself because he didn’t know the meaning. This is yet another fact that proves the community is unable to progress and move forward if the members do not have feelings. Without feelings, you cannot have empathy. Having empathy is important because it helps us understand what the other person is feeling. People wouldn’t experience the ability to trust, to have human compassion, to have meaningful relationships and there would be a certain loss of

Everyone is burden with pain. No one can escape emotional, physical or mental misery because it is part of what makes us human. Without pain we would live in a world of sameness. Although there is no way we can escape this reality, what if there existed a utopian society in which everyone could live peacefully without the burden of pain? Would everyone be better off or would living in ignorance be a burden for someone else? Lois Lowry gives us a glimpse into what life would be like in a world where conflict does not exist and shows us what this type of world would do to our humanity. In The Giver, she introduces us to Jonas, an eleven-year-old boy who starts off as an oblivious member of his

The Community is a horrible place compared to our country. Read more to find out why. A utopia is a world or place that is perfect in every way, and a dystopia is a world or place that has major flaws and is horrible. (The Giver) is a dystopian society and that is because they kill the smallest of any one twin, also they have drugs that keep them from hitting puberty. The Community in (the Giver) and our society are similar and different because parts of the world and the Community have people that make decisions in society, and MOST of the nations do not kill twins like the Community does.

In The Giver the authorities aim at achieving “Sameness” which means all people must be equal and the same. Lois Lowry describes a world of “sameness” where the lack of differences allows all members of the community to have predetermined roles and to follow an enforced set of rules. The Elders depict sameness in a way that makes it sound absolutely necessary, and without it, the whole world may fall apart. In the community of The Giver people accept everything as it is because they do not know any difference: “Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time … we relinquished sunshine and did away with difference” (Lowry, Giver 95). This sameness is terrifying and further imposes conformity on all people. So the community of The Giver is a uniformed society. People wear the same clothes; eat the same food; their houses are the same; and most of them look the same as well. By the age of ten, they all have the same short hair style: “females lost their braids at Ten, and males, too, relinquished their long childish hair took on the more manly style which exposed their ears” (Lowry, Giver 46). In The Giver the purpose of sameness is to protect people from wrong choices and to achieve safety for them.

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

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.

In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, the Giver and Jonas use the two following quotes to justify their community’s idea of “Sameness”, where everyone is the same but has no choice. The Giver tells Jonas, “Life here is so orderly so predictable—so painless.” In response, Jonas says, “We really have to protect people from wrong choices.” Eventually, both Jonas and the Giver realize that sameness is wrong and that it is better to be equal, to have the same rights, but able to choose to be different.

Imagine living in a world where nothing changed and everyone was the same. In Lois Lowry’s novel, The Giver, the society is all the same. For example the people of the society do not fight and there is no war. Sameness is slowly working its way into our society. It is used as uniforms in some schools, even secluding yourself to a specific friend group because everyone has the same interests could be considered as Sameness. I believe Sameness is a major advantage due to no one suffering, but living where a society is completely the same would not be an interesting life to live. The Giver portrays how sameness in a society could have advantages and disadvantages.

Elvis Presley once said, “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain 't goin ' away.” Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave relates to this quote by focusing on the truths of reality that humans do not comprehend. We think that we understand what we are seeing in our world, but we really just perceive shadows of the true forms of the things that make up the world. We are ignorant about the true nature of reality. The novel, The Giver, by Lois Lowry also involves these concepts. The main character, Jonas, lives in a community of conformity and conflict. When he begins to spend time and train with The Giver, an old man who is the only keeper of the community 's memories, Jonas discovers the unsafe truths of his community 's secret past. Once Jonas discovers the reality about his community, it constantly pesters him until he makes an important decision. Jonas realizes that he must escape from his world in order to make a long needed change for his community. As the prisoner from The Allegory of the Cave seeks knowledge outside of the cave, Jonas from The Giver discovers dark and deadly truths of his community’s secret past that will change his life forever.

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.

In Jonas’s society they have no feelings or as they call it, stirrings. In this society when you first start to have stirrings, you start taking pills to control your hormones. In Jonas’s society love has become so obsolete that when Jonas asked his mother if she loved him she told him, “ Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete.” [Lowry 159-160]. That’s how much they don’t know about feelings.

The Marxist criticism is based on the socialist theories of Karl Marx and how the readers must closely examine the dynamics of class as they attempt to understand the works they read. In a world where there is no pain, no prejudice, no emotion, and no detestation. Lois Lowry gives a vivid description of a community where everything is equal, everyone is just as important as another, and life choices are made by only one individual. In the book The giver by Lois Lowry, it expresses the exact opposite of Marx’s most important ideas which is a prime example of what people will do if they were forced to live a certain way.