Who Is Lois Lowry's The Giver: Social Criticism

She truly wishes to paint a picture with her words and really does want readers to see her image but only the “right” way. O’Connor is vigorous in the way she writes and only the most grotesque readers will truly understand this and appreciate her work; and why foreshadow helped bring to life a piece of work such as A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

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 living in world where there are no feelings, color, or pain, and everyone is the same besides you. Jonas realized he was living in a world without color, pain, or feelings. Without color, pain, and feeling Jonas wasn’t able to express true happiness, and he therefore left the community. “Lois Lowry’s childhood escapades inspired her books,”(Dellinger). Also Lois loved photography and it resulted in the cover of The Giver, which is a photo of a blind painter. This connects to the book because no one can see in color besides the giver and the receiver, which is Jonas. Lois Lowry uses the literary elements foreshadowing, symbolism, and imagery to express the theme that one cannot have happiness without pain, in the book The Giver.

Through her essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”, she defends the individuality and moral value of Southern fiction. She makes a clear distinction between the correct and incorrect usages of the “grotesque”. Many fiction authors, particularly those from the North, write stories that deal with social and economic issues. O’Connor disagrees with this tradition. Fiction, she argues, should not reflect the concerns of the public but rather the perspective of the author. It should “distort” the reader in a way that does not “destroy… [but] reveals” and that requires a lot of self-reflection on the author’s part who must then transmit that vision to his or her readers no matter how skeptical they may be (“Novelist and Believer”). And the reader must approach the story from an open-minded position. They should not expect the story to be uplifting or entirely pleasant. Only then would readers be able to understand that seemingly “grotesque” characters hold much more moral value than at

According to the American Library Association (ALA), young adult novels are challenged with the best intentions. In most cases a parent will read a book that their child might be reading in class to find out if the book is hazardous to their child’s well-being. If the novel seems problematic, the parent then challenges the book. Even though the purpose of challenging a novel is to keep children from reading about issues that may not be seen as appropriate for their age group, censoring children from difficult subject matter is not always the solution. There is always controversy when difficult issues arise in adolescent geared novels. Even though there are many concerns with Lois Lowry’s The Giver,

To the casual reader, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem cold and void of emotion. Her storylines are like a misty fog in the dead of winter, enveloping the reader with a harsh even violent atmosphere. Her short stories regularly end in traumatic, freak deaths or, at the very least, a character's emotional destruction. An analysis of “Greenleaf,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” or “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” will leave the reader feeling empty. The imagination of the reader is not engaged on any level. There is an under current of anti-religion which is intensified by cruelty. O’Connor’s writing is filled with symbolism which is camouflaged by her writing style. Although her writing style is not considered by experts as

Damon Knight’s “The Country of the Kind” follows a narrator who the audience at first knows little about, who lives in a society that is different from the norm, but is also initially left ambiguous. This sense of the unknown exists up until the narrator stumbles upon a pamphlet which opens up new viewpoints to the reader. The pamphlet serves to create three new perspectives in particular, all of which significantly shift the reader’s understanding of the story. First, it gives the reader a chance to understand the narrator and sympathize with him. Second, it offers a new perspective on society and their overall conception of what defines a utopia. The third and final perspective is that of the people who live within this society, and their interactions with the main characters. These three new perspectives prove to be formative in understanding the main character, his interactions with other characters in the story, and the role of society.

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

The Giver, by Lois Lowry is about a young boy named Jonas who is growing up in a utopian society. In The Giver they have no memories of anything that has pain even involved which meant that the community had to get rid of some joyful things also. Jonas, the receiver, and The Giver himself are the only two that know the memories. The author, Lois Lowry, was given the Newbery medal in 1994. In her acceptance speech of the medal she stated things in her life that influenced her book, The Giver. Many of the events in Lois Lowry’s life had really influenced many of the big events in The Giver.

In this novel, foreshadowing is a crucial literary element that Lois Lowry uses to give the reader hints about what is going to happen later on in the book. Foreshadowing gives the reader an idea of the main character's personality, introduces the conflicts that are yet to happen, and discreetly proposes the main theme: the importance of being an individual. Lois Lowry even chose to begin her book with foreshadowing by saying, "It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to feel frightened." (Lowry 6). For example, at the beginning of the book, Lowry introduces the one thing that makes Jonas physically different than the rest of the population in the community: his eyes. Jonas has pale looking eyes, just like the Giver. This is a way of telling the reader that he is special, and will have significant role in changing the community. Another example of this element in the book is the “seeing beyond” that Jonas starts to experience. This example foreshadows the internal changes that are going occur to Jonas later on in the story. “The apple had changed. Just for an instant. It had changed…” (Lowry, 51). Through these examples, foreshadowing easily gives the reader a better understanding of how important it is to have a unique personality.

The novel The Giver by Lois Lowry illustrates a dystopian society hi lighting the limitations of individuality and suppression of cultural memory in order to prevent any potential destruction that warrants deviation from the totalitarian state of mind with the society depends on. The dependence on the elaborately regulate system however causes the burden of beneficial and detrimental knowledge to the rest on one person's shoulders. Through sociological analysis I will analyze the effects of this reliance on the Giver’s ability to retain such crucial information on a singular causes the detrimental affect triggered not by the inability of the Giver but rather by the society’s unwillingness to change. It can be observed that dystopian societies are ambivalent in nature, situated in utopian text; however, in Lowry's novel the world is engineered where the utopia goes wrong due to its extinction of the aesthetic and personal choices. In “The Utopian the Function of memory in Lois Lowry’s the giver, the author analyzes the ambiguity between the dystopian aspect and the utopian aspect of the society created in the novel (Hanson).

To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless cruelty.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry is one of the most controversial books in American schools. It is the most censored book in America. Lois Lowry uses several themes in her book that have been labeled as being unsuited or inappropriate for the age group, meaning that the story is too dark for children to read. According to the ALA “parents called the book ‘lewd’ and ‘twisted’” (Munley). Themes explored in The Giver that caused disputes between parents and across America that made the book controversial was due to its violent themes, sexual content and depiction of infanticide and euthanasia, others, however, praised her work, and Lowry won the 1994 Newbery for the novel (LitChart).

School shootings, bombings, rape, and murder are words that are commonly seen in newspaper headlines and heard on the morning news. To most people these acts seem like senseless violence. However, writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O’Connor use these same violent images to deliver a powerful moral message. Their stories “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are very comparable in the lessons that they teach.

Lowry touches upon in the Giver is euthanasia. In General,The society in the novel "The Giver it has alot of similarities and diffrences in our mordern day society. Jonas, as a result of conflict with his beginning of the story to the end on the novel. examples and gives many alike diveraent characteristis about Uto For example,in "The Giver'',we both live in a distopya society. Instead, we all have problems in the same society.