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Theme Of Memories In The Giver

Decent Essays
In Lois Lowry’s futuristic novel The Giver, teenager Jonas starts to question everything he has been told, after being selected in an assignment that teaches him the unknown concept of memories. Memories make our life meaningful because they help us to remember important lessons and bring happiness to our lives, however memories can be useless as they cause us to feel pain. Despite the fact that memories allow us to experience happiness, the readers learn through the novel that memories aren’t necessarily needed in order to to live a meaningful life, given we should be living in the present.

Memories are important parts of our lives, as they play a major role in helping us to remember important life lessons, and also bring us happiness. Everything we know is based off our memories which is why they are a significant part of our growth. They allow us to remember all of the important things we have learnt during our life and teach us to learn from our previous mistakes. If memories were nonexistent like they are in Jonas’ community, we wouldn't have the capability to store and remember all of the things we are taught, given we use memories to help recall what we have learnt. It would also become difficult to teach, as the knowledge we have is all from memories meaning the knowledge being taught would be constantly changing and eventually become wrong, over time. This is shown by The Giver when he tells Jonas that all of his instructors are wrong. “My instructors in science
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