The giver

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The Giver by Lois Lowry

A society based on rules. A society and a world in which every individual is born and raised for a certain purpose, A world where people live for the society rather than the society existing for the people. Is this the perfect world?
Lois Lowry, the author of The Giver gives us this tale which takes place in our world, although in a very distant future, but it might as well have been located on an another planet because of the big differences from our daily world.

The Plot
A young boy named Jonas who lives with his "parents" and his sister in a community. The community is the world for him and he has never been outside the domains of the community.
In some ways this community seems like an absolutely awful place, but in a lot of other ways, it really is a perfect world.
In this weird world every child is raised with a purpose, to work for the community in a given position. The goal for everybody is to help the community to stay "alive". Money does not exist and the reason for that is that nobody needs it. Food is distributed by special Food Delivery people and if you are sick, you will not have any problems getting the proper medicine, since there is enough for everyone in the community. All children are given bicycles at the age of nine and teddy bears and other textile animals, so called comfort objects are being recycled all the time.
Unemployment has never been heard of. Homelessness is not a problem either.
The reason for this is that the population is always restricted to a certain number: "Two children, one male and one female to each family unit. It was written clearly in the rules."(Page 8)
This way there will always be enough of everything for everyone. So far, nothing seems very strange. A community where everything and everyone is taken care of is something we should all strive for. But, the weird thing is that it seems like the people are walking round like zombies and doing the things they are told to.
One of the main words of this story is “sameness”. Comfort for everyone, every time. Nothing changes in this place. Everyone does what they’ve always done, as far as they know. The weather is constantly the same. Nobody has ever heard about rain or snow or even sunshine. The fact is that something as obvious to us as colours does not exist. In our society, most people will not consider watching a black and white TV, if they have access to one in colour. Imagine then living in a black and white world. This would probably seem unthinkable for someone from our world, so why isn’t it so for the inhabitants of this community? The answer is that they have absolutely nothing to compare with. They know only what they have. So how can they possibly be aware of what they are missing? They believe they are happy and that is enough.

All the memories from the old world have been handed over to one person, the Giver, who passes the memories on to the Receiver, who will become the next Giver and pass on the memories to a new Receiver and so on. In other words, all memories, from the beginning of time, are stored in the mind of one person. And Jonas has been assigned as the new giver.





Reflections

The good things about the world in The Giver are that everybody is safe and violence does not exist. Everybody has access to medication, no one is starving and everybody have the same standards. And to sum it all up, there are both good and bad sides to this story. It all depends on what you compare it with. For me, it is a strange place where nothing ever changes. For the inhabitants it is a safe and peaceful community that provides them with all the things they need.

The history of our present world contains of a great deal of pain, wars, starvation, torture and all the other terrible injustices we have created during our short period of time on earth.
This book really reminds me of communism where everybody is a part of a functioning m...