“The Giver” by Lois Lowry is a novel published in 1993 by Bantam Books which consist of a 179 pages. What would happen if you lived in a world filled with sameness? A perfect society where people were proper and polite? It seems a little too perfect, don’t you think? In this novel we will absorb the many memories our main character will face, from sameness to different.
Jonas, a young man, lives in a perfect world. In this world, pain, fear, and warfare were nonexistent. At age twelve, members of the community were assigned a job based on his or her abilities and interest. Jonas was selected to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver holds memories of true pain and pleasures of life, which were passed on from previous Receivers. In his training, he will learn the truth, and gain knowledge.
Jonas lives with his father, a Nurturer of new children, his mother, who works at the Department of Justice, and his seven-year-old sister Lily, his family unit. At the beginning of the novel, he is apprehensive about the upcoming Ceremony of Twelve, when he will be given his official Assignment as a new adult member of the community. He volunteered in many places, from the House of The Old, to the Nurturing Center.
He lived every day the same, as did all the people in the community, from morning dream telling to the evening ritual telling of feelings. One day in the playground he and his best friend Asher were playing catch with an apple. Jonas noticed a sudden “change” in the apple, midair, but didn’t know what it was.The novel takes place in the future of a utopian society where all negative memories and feelings are nonexistent. It is an important aspect of the story because it takes place in a civilization where there are no differences but sameness. The author directly presents the characters, like “Jonas was beginning to be frightened” from chapter one page one. The story is told by a third person narrator whose point of view is limited to what Jonas observes and thinks. The story is told from Jonas’s point of view. We see all the actions and events through Jonas’s eyes and don’t have access to any information to which Jonas does not have access to. Protagonist is Jonas, an eleven-year-old boy who is chosen to be the new Receiver on the Ceremony of Twelve.
The Plot of the story is Jonas becoming the new Receiver; he receives memories that change the way he thinks about himself and his community forever. Then Jonas realizes that when his father “releases” new children he actually kills them, Jonas reaches a point of no return. His frustration with his community and his desire to change it has been gradually developing, and finally Jonas cannot accept the society’s insensitivity to the value of human life. He is determined to change things. In order to put his plan into action, Jonas flees the community on bicycle with the new child Gabe, escaping search planes and enduring hunger and pain to try to bring feelings and color to his community and bring him to the world he has memories of knowing.
The major conflict of the story is when Jonas’s new emotional and physical awareness cause him to rebel against the restrictions his society places on individuality, freedom of choice, human experience, and emotion.
The theme of the novel is displaying the importance of memory and how those memories form an individual, and displaying the importance of human life. It shows the importance of love and individuality. The novel can even be seen as an allegory for this process of maturation: twelve-year-old Jonas rejects a society of Sameness to follow his own path. The novel encourages readers to celebrate differences instead of disapproving them or pretending they do not exist.
This book was a great read because of the lessons I’ve learned, which are: the importance of memory, without it you wouldn’t really understand the state of being something if you don’t have a memory of it, and the importance of individuality, sameness is such a tedious thing to be, having something different about you is key to being unique. The display of “precision of language” was interesting, how if an individual used slang terms they were to be chastised, seems like a great way of learning how to use proper grammar. All in all, this novel was an intriguing read; I recommend this novel to adolescences from eleven to sixteen. Although most parts were predictable, the moral of the story won me over.