The Giver

Imanol Flores

The Giver By Lois Lowry, first appears as a utopian society in which everyone is equal and respected. The Giver describes the community as a dystopian society, where people are assigned spouses and children. Everyone must take "the pill" to remove feelings, love, and emotion for one another. When Jonas (the main character) is chosen to become the new receiver of memories he is shocked to have been chosen to take on such a respected and important role in the community. The receiver of memories is a person that holds knowledge of previous generations, such as the ideas of feelings, love, color ( no one sees color in the community), anger, hunger, warfare, death, etc... The community in which Jonas lived in had people in higher power selecting everyone's names, assigned families, assigned spouses, and assigning babies to families. Once Jonas started his training he had received happy memories such as sledding down a mountain, people enjoying their christmas. Jonas also received sad memories such as people dying of war and hunger. Jonas confessed to the giver that he thought everyone should hold these memories as well. Jonas soon stopped taking the pill and he started to plan his escape from his community with the givers helps. Leaving the community was forbidden and once the receiver of memories left everyone would receive the good and bad memories that Jonas holds. Jonas rebels against the community by breaking rule to escape and runaway into a world he knows nothing about. After days of running away Jonas ends up finding the mountain with the sled at the top just like his first memory. After he sleds down he ends up at the cabin in which the family was having a gathering and giving each other gifts. The books there in which i assume it continues into the following book.

Once Jonas begins his training with the Giver, however, the tendencies he showed in his earlier life-his sensitivity, his heightened perceptual powers, his kindness to and interest in people, his curiosity about new experiences, his honesty, and his high intelligence-make him extremely absorbed in the memories the Giver has to transmit. In turn, the memories, with their rich sensory and emotional experiences, enhance all of Jonas's unusual qualities. Within a year of training, he becomes extremely sensitive to beauty, pleasure, and suffering, deeply loving toward his family and the Giver, and fiercely passionate about his new beliefs and feelings. Things about the community that used to be mildly perplexing or troubling are now intensely frustrating or depressing, and Jonas's inherent concern for others and desire for justice makes him yearn to make changes in the community, both to awaken other people to the richness of life and to stop the casual cruelty that is practiced in the community. Jonas is also very determined, committing to a task fully when he believes in it and willing to risk his own life for the sake of the people he loves.