The Giver By Lois Lowry

“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

Do you want to reach perfection? Perfection itself is not captured through success, it is carried with you through failure. The average person wants to be perfect in some form, but never wants to fail. In the book The Giver by Lois Lowry, a group of elders try and perfect a world so people will never fail, like their previous world. The previous world was much like ours today, but humans’ freedom caused destruction. Although the new society holds memories from the people. This is completely wrong because memories guide us. Memories keep us from repeating our past and memories shape our future. Your memories are vital to achieving perfection.

Imagine a world with no feelings, no color, no choice; a world where individuality and freedom are exchanged for security and sameness. This type of world is a reality for Jonas, the protagonist in Lois Lowry’s The Giver. After being assigned the next Receiver of Memories in the community, where he has the capacity to see beyond. As he begins his works, he gains wisdom and through that wisdom, learned that protecting the community from the memories, their lives lacked understanding and feelings. Jonas goes on an archetypal hero’s journey and chooses to risk everything to restore memories and wisdom to everyone in the community. Throughout this novel, Jonas is represented as a hero considering he demonstrates integrity despite living in a

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.

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

A book named The Giver by Lois Lowry published in 1993 teaches many life lessons that everyone needs to learn in some point in their life. In this novel it is about a twelve year old boy named Jonas who realizes his perfect society isn’t so perfect. When he was picked for the New Receiver of Memories he learned things that were hidden from the people of the community. The more Jonas learns about the past the more he wants to change how the community sees the world. In The Giver, the author uses an image of a utopia, the people in the community, and The Giver to develop the theme that emotions are needed in life.

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

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.

Mankind has spent a millennium finding a way to a utopia, of that millennia they only found themselves in a dystopia. The Giver reveals the reality of mankind’s inclination of a dystopia as Jonas, the main protagonist of The Giver, uncovers his city’s darkest secrets in “preserving” the perfect world. The Giver takes place in a world where human individuality is believed as an imperfect quality. Things like “precision of language and “sameness” are the values citizens believe are right. Humans are “programmed” to eliminate the important human values like love, anger, and happiness the people today cherish. The citizens are like robots, prioritised with blankness until they are nothing but heartless droids of layers of heartless programming and machinery. Jonas is given one of the community’s

The Giver is a novel that is set in  a society that strives to be a utopia. A utopia is  essentially a is “a place where no one has to make a decision, feel pain or even have a negative thought or a bad memory” (Goepfert). In The Giver their community focuses so intensely on this concept of a peace that they make many sacrifices in their pursuit to obtain it. This includes the loss of emotion, lack of individuality, deceit of the public, and a great burden on a small few.  Ultimately the cost of this utopia is too high for this society.

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.

Lois Lowry’s novel, The Giver, offers a thought provoking, well written story, because it changes the perspective of anyone who dares to read it to. Lowry places her novel, at some point in the future when mankind has gone away with changes and choices in life. She forces readers appreciate, or at least re-think the world they live in today. Her novel presents a fully human created environment where people have successfully blocked out conflict, grief, and individuality. Each person follows the same routine every day. Failure comply with standards, to be different, means death. Jonas, the main character, finds himself trapped in this world.

Throughout history, mankind has gradually become a more centralized and cohesive unit. While revolutionaries such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had to dream of a united humanity, this dream is now within reach and humanity can now embrace its destiny and free the masses. For once mankind does not have to dream, the near perfect utopia of the future, the perfect society, is within its grasp. Some novels, such as The Giver by Lois Lowry, can aid in giving an example of a Utopian paradise for all.

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

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.