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Dystopia in the Novel “The Giver” by Lois Lowry Summary

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The community where Jonas lies has a secret that only Jonas and The Giver knows. A place that contains the past, present, and future, where all life began. “The Giver” is a dystopian novel written by Lois Lowry in 1993.

The main characters in the story are The Giver, Asher, Gabriel, Jonas, and Lily. The central character Jonas is on a mission to elsewhere, a place his community has never heard before or never seen before. Jonas society is an example of dystopian, however, it has some utopian features in it. Jonas’s community is an attempt at a utopia a perfect society with no pain, suffering, or violence. The Giver portrays a failed utopia, it is anti-utopian or a dystopia a world in which everything has gone wrong.

Jonas’s society is dystopian because of all of the strict rules his community has. Some examples are, “Pilots cannot fly over the community, ” Jonas hears announced in Chapter 1. When they do, they are “released”(released is a death sentence, so they are injected with a lethal injection, and their bodies are thrown away).

Another rule is, Each person in a family must share his/her dreams in the morning, and in the evening, his/her feelings of the day. “It was one of the rituals, the evening telling of feelings. Lily tells of being “angry,” but her father mollifies her feelings since no strong emotions are permitted. There are many other rules that are very strict in the community.

This illustrates that the community is dystopian since it has a lot of strict rules. I think the Giver portrays a dystopian society by the community’s method of release. Every citizen’s friend who is getting a release thought their dear friend was going Elsewhere, but if they only knew that their friend was going to die. There were no such things as identical twins if there were one of them would be released, whoever was lighter by weight. If the community doesn’t know anything about love, why should they know pain, suffering, death, and, war?

However, Jonas’s community is also utopian. Every morning when they get up they don’t have to worry about their hair or their clothing because they all wear the same clothes, so they don’t get bullied. For example, they don’t choose their spouses, the government does.

Another reason that the Jonas community is Utopian because it doesn’t matter what you look like in Jonas’s community because there is sameness. This shows that people haven’t cared what they looked like, and they don’t care about what other people think about them. Not only is never worrying about what you look like in Jonas’s community, but you also don’t have to get stressed or worry about getting a job, the community provides you one based on what you do and what you like to do.

For example, Asher got his assignment based on what he does and what he likes. The assignment he got was Assistant Director of Recreation because he likes coming up with new games, and he likes playing games. People also never starve, because food is free, but everybody gets the same amount, and everybody has the same social structure. No one has a higher class than them, and no one has a lower class, they all get treated the same.

References

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Dystopia in the Novel “The Giver” by Lois Lowry Summary. (2020, Sep 22). Retrieved from https://samploon.com/dystopia-in-the-novel-the-giver-by-lois-lowry/

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