The Giver by Lois Lowry

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.

The setting in the Giver is this community where the people inside are not able to feel or to have a choice of their own. Could you ever imagine yourself living in a world where you couldn’t be able to feel and have a choice of your own? Well, I really couldn’t imagine myself in Jonas’s position. Jonas’s society is very different compared to our society. One thing which is different from our society than Jonas’s society is that we can have feelings.

The Giver is written from Jonas’s confusion, excitement, glory, and discoveries. Jonas is a twelve-year-old boy living in a futuristic civilization that has eliminated all pain, fear, love, and free will. There is no chauvinism, since everyone looks and acts basically the same, and there are no “important” choices to be made, also, everyone is consistently polite. The “perfect” society Jonas lives in has also abolished choice: At age twelve every member of the community is assigned a job based on his or her abilities and interests. Citizens can apply for compatible spouses, who are assigned to them based on interests and jobs and each couple is allowed to receive exactly two children each. (Notice that I said receive, not give birth to.) In addition to that, spouses don’t show any signs of love or affection, just the word love, even when pointed at their children, makes them burst in laughter and explanations! Citizens who break rules or fail to adapt properly to the society’s codes of behavior are “released”. Everything is planned and organized so that life is as convenient and pleasant as possible, or so they think.

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.

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 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.

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.

In The Giver, the male is given an assigned spouse and together they receive one son and one daughter only and they are assigned to them as well. In the book it says Like the matching of spouses and the placement of children (Lowry 59). In this quote, Jonas explains how the family structure is and it shows how each family is assigned to each other. In today's society, kids grow up to be and then parents find someone they love and then get married. Then they have kids who are produced by the parents, unlike the giver they are assigned.

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

In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Jonas, the protagonist and the only person who really evolves throughout the plot, experiences internal conflict because after learning about the past through the Giver, he wants to change the current world he lives in but is afraid of the consequences if he does so. The Giver focuses on Jonas and his journey towards freedom and becoming wiser.

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.

The Giver by Lois Lowry tells the story of a young man growing up in a Utopia community where nothing bad happens. This story is told by the view of Jonas and his feelings throughout the story, the story itself happens through the eyes of Jonas. Jonas is born into a perfect community; Families are required to apply for children, married couples do not get to choose each other, they are matched to one another. Jonas lives in a perfect utopia where the Community of Elders controls everything beyond the means of setting rules and how the community is ran. The developing plot is when Jonas escapes the community with a child named Gabriel, who is to be killed. Jonas escapes so that he is able to transmit his memories to the Giver who will transmit them back to the people in the community so that they will be able to began feeling pain and emotions again, to be forced to remember the past before this perfect utopia was created.

“’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.

The giver is a fictional novel authorised by Louis Lowry dedicated to informing readers about the devastating impact of extreme conformity on a community. As we progress throughout the book we start to realise and learn all these new things about the giver's community, such as creating and trying to maintain a perfect community, that comes beyond our abilities, while the givers society is having a huge impact on the individuality and individual choices on the members of the community. We learn that the inhabitants of the society had a hard time handling all the different memories, in a sudden event. All hints and evidence to these statements above are hidden and presented throughout the book.

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.