Revised Blog Post Literary Essay 2

The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is about a boy named Jonas who’s different. He sees everything differently. He thinks differently. He believes for a difference. But he wasn’t always like this. Not until he met the Giver –not until he was chosen to be the next Receiver of Memory. Even though he can “See Beyond,” or see color in a bleak world, his ideas didn’t start until he had the knowledge to understand his world. The Receiver of Memory advises the Community, and then when the Receiver gets old, a new one is chosen. The Giver, the previous receiver, must pass on memories to Jonas. With that, Jonas realizes the truth, and knows that he must leave the community with a new child to find a new place to live, so that he and those who can see beyond can experience life – the way it should be. In Lowry’s book, she discusses the essence of humanity and, after the community submits their diversity with “sameness,” an idea where there is no love, no hate, and everything is the same, do they lose their humanity as well? Lowry uses Jonas’ quest throughout the novel to answer her own questions.

At the beginning of the story, Jonas is a scared 12 year old, who has been singled out in the ceremony where everyone’s jobs are chosen. He doesn’t understand why this is happening to him. He is afraid that something bad is happening to him, and, in a way, it is. He’s forcibly taking on all the pain and suffering of the community and the world in general. In the text, it says, “Earlier that day, dressing in his own dwelling, he had practiced the kind of jaunty, self-assured walk that he hoped he could make to the stage when his turn came. All of that was forgotten now. He simply willed himself to stand, to move his feet that felt weighted and clumsy, and to go forward, up the steps and across the platform until he stood at her side.”

As the story progresses, Jonas starts to uncover the truth of his bleak community, and how the true meaning of life had been stolen from them all. The Giver allows him to live to the fullest, as he does, unlike the rest of the community. The Giver teaches him to see beyond, and see the colors for what they are. He teaches Jonas love, he teaches him joy, and pure-happiness as well – but he also teaches him pain. Jonas questions his world for what it is and why it exists, and why people are denied the wonders he is granted through memory. In the text, Jonas asks his parents if they love him, and his parents chuckle, saying how he needs to remember precision of language. “’Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s become obsolete,’ his mother carefully explained. Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory.”

At the end of the book, Jonas and the Giver realize how they must make a change in their people. If they were to leave, their memories would be released into the community, and then the people would have to bear them themselves – but Jonas and the Giver are not trying to ruin the people of the community, they’re trying to help them. So Jonas decides to leave so that the community will get his memories, and the Giver would stay behind to help the community deal with them, so that they could become wiser and stronger – so that everyone could know the true meaning of life with their emotions back. Emotions, along with brain capacity, are what mainly differentiates humans from other animals. Without true emotions, due to sameness as in The Giver, humans don’t have culture, they don’t have love, they don’t have happiness, and they don’t have hatred, so where does that leave them? What do we become when stripped of our emotions? We are stripped of the thing that makes us human.  

The Giver, by Lois Lowry is a story that uncovers the true meaning of life, what it’s like without it, and the measures people will take to achieve it – or, in Jonas and the Giver’s case, share it with others and do what’s right. Lowry gives the world an idea of what life without emotions could look like – bleak, boring, and asking to be defied because, as we witnessed in The Giver, a world of such would go against human nature. The book gives Lowry’s perspective to what life would be like in such a society, where there is no pain or choices, but more importantly, no freedoms, self-control, or life.