Table of Contents
Introduction
The book which is recommended is The Giver, written by Lois Lowry. The book was published in 2008, published by HarperCollins Press and bound in 240 pages. The paper describes the general content of the book and the characteristics of the world in the book.
Brief Summary
The Giver is science fiction. The novel constructs a future society similar to utopia. But as the plot develops, it gradually turns into a dystopia. The novel tells the story of a boy named Jonas when he was 12 years old. Written in the third person, the novel follows the perspective of the main character, Jonas, as he waits for his employment celebration.
Through deliberate assimilation, residents lived in a community free of pain and conflict, while people lived without emotion and memories. Jonas was selected to take over the position of “memory receiver”, accepting all the previous human memory for use when needed.
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Jonas acquired these memories from his predecessor, the giver: violence, sadness and loss, as well as love, beauty, joy, adventure and family. In the end, knowing these feelings, Jonas realized that what sustains the society is just a lie and was determined to change the community and bring emotion back into the world.
Description Analysis
The author’s description of this almost demonized utopian society has its own characteristics. The article will describe and analyze the world written by the author from five aspects.
For the family aspect, the family in society all is “model family”. Both the man and the woman can apply to the committee for marriage, and the committee will make reasonable and scientific arrangements according to the characteristics of the two sides to build a harmonious family. After a certain period of time, each family can apply to claim their children as a family of three, up to two children, and only one boy and one girl.
“Two children — one male, one female — to each family unit. It was written very clearly in the rules.”(Lowry,5)
Because the population of the community is constant, with 50 children per year, if you have more children in your family, everyone else will have one less. The children are adopted at the age of four, and grow up in the family, forming a family and having a career. Finally, the elders will enter a professional nursing home and finally be “released”.
In terms of reproduction, society is like a precision machine, with 50 new babies born every year. The children grow up numbered, nameless and unaware of their birth parents. For the first few years, they are raised by “nurturers” who, if they meet certain medical requirements, can join a formal family at the age of four or be “released”.
In terms of education, children receive unified and strict education since childhood, one of the most important of which is words and behaviors. Children will be punished for “inaccurate speech” since childhood, in order to keep the whole society consistent in language communication. Children’s education is more like a mental overhaul, shaping an innocent child into a rigid conformist who lives by rules.
In terms of career, everyone works with their own age group at the age of 12, the unemployment rate is zero percent, and each child’s career is measured by the volunteer service time of each child by the ruling class elite in the community.
The committee taps into their interests and believes that all decisions are best for the child. There are many types of jobs, such as leadership, social maintenance, motherhood and memory teaching. Every occupation needs different regulations but all of them have the same professional ethics.
What underpins every aspect of this society must be the rule of law. Under the rule of law, people are born to abide by a strict set of rules. For those who break the rules, a community-wide announcement is made by a “spokesman” who notifies the community of what has happened and asks the perpetrator to report somewhere, without naming him or her.
As long as each person violates the regulations for more than three times, it should mean that the circumstances are relatively serious and the attitude is not good, directly “release”. The word “release” exists in every corner of society, but most people don’t know the facts.
“There were only two occasions of release which were not punishment. Release of the elderly, which was a time of celebration for a life well and fully lived; and release of a new child which always brought a sense of what-could-we-have-done. This was especially troubling for the Nurturers, like Father, who felt they had failed somehow. But it happened very rarely.”(Lowry, 5)
The release is actually death, the end of life. Children who don’t meet the standards will be released, those who break the rules will be released, and old people of a certain age will be released. All the residents think that the release is a glorious thing, but they cannot see the lies hidden by society.
The seemingly perfect system actually sacrifices a lot of people’s nature, but people under the rule, the ruled class are even ignorant, they don’t know many things, such as pain, hunger, and love. Of course, ignorance may bring them the happiness they originally expected. They can’t see the color, they can’t appreciate the music. They don’t even have memories. They have no real feelings and the taste of “difference”.
“Almost every citizen in the community had dark eyes. His parents did, and Lily did, and so did all of his group members and friends. But there were a few exceptions: Jonas himself, and a female Five who he had noticed had the different, lighter eyes. No one mentioned such things; it was not a rule, but was considered rude to call attention to things that were unsettling or different about individuals.”(Lowry, 22)
In this book, after getting the memory, Jonas had a preliminary experience of the happiness brought by these memories. He could start to see the blue sky and white clouds, feel the crystal snow and warm love. Further, he learned that this society is not the same in the past, just after seeing The Sameness.
In order to guarantee the development of agriculture and the convenience of traffic, the weather has been controlled, and they’re always will be a sunny day. All people are gray eyesight, so everyone doesn’t struggle with what color of clothes to wear every day and will only be satisfied with the existing self-colored things. Desire is the most important thing to be suppressed in this society. Every citizen takes drugs to control his desire, without love or the most essential sexual desire.
Through these memories, he looks at the society he lives in through our modern human perspective, but he cannot change, and he feels lonely again and again, because his memories cannot be shared with others, and sometimes even regarded by his parents as “imprecise words”. He even found that the hidden dark side of the harmonious society, such as “release” is actually the death penalty, but most of the community does not know it is the death penalty.
If the newborn baby is a twin, it is necessary to “release” one of the lighter children. Since in such a harmonious society, even confusion caused by twins is not allowed. And he learned that the person who “released” the newborn was his father, or more precisely, the father figure in his family. In the end, he chose to escape from the community and give his memory back to the rest of the community. He is a savior and a destroyer of false worlds.
Actually, human emotion is very rare. Emotions, like logical thinking, are learned, not innate. It is social and, like reason, which marks man’s special place. The way humans acquire emotions is through experiences, including their own and sharing the experiences of others. By sharing experiences, we gain our own understanding and emotions.
Like logical thinking, emotions constitute one of the ways we perceive the world. In fact, the acquisition of emotion may be more difficult than the acquisition of logical thinking. Just as our ability to think logically affects how we perceive the world, our level of “emotional ability” also affects how we perceive the world. If “intelligence quotient” represents one’s logical ability, then “emotion quotient” correspondingly represents emotional ability and the combination of the two results in “wisdom”.
I value emotional ability more than logical ability. I prefer to have the ability to experience emotions and share others’ feelings. In my opinion, emotion embodies a more essential aspect of human nature. Rather than rational and logical existence, “laugh, cry, love and pain” is a clearer sign that a person is truly alive. Personal feelings should be respected, not repressed, not denied awareness and annihilated by lies. This is living in the real. And without the authenticity of the emotion, the fact that people are alive becomes unreal.
In The Giver, The “receiver” takes away all the memory of people and plays a great role in shaping this emotionless utopia. The author has been deeply aware that experience, memory and history are the basis of shaping human emotions. Human emotions are formed through interpersonal relationships, so they must be fully developed with the help of rich experience. Therefore, the previous experience, memory and history are so important. History helps shape emotions, and emotions help shape societies and lives.
Conclusion
The author creates a world, a safer world. But people in the world have lost their real experience of the world. As children grow up, they acquire more and more knowledge and ignore the real experience as human beings. But when people find that they can deal with problems more easily or even without problems, they are already on their way to death.
Only give up the pursuit of certainty, face the uncertainty, cherish the precious real experience can we live the real life. Only in that way, will come to the real human world. And it is the real emotional world. That’s what I learn from the story.
Work Cited
- Lois, Lowry. The Giver. Lvl 13, 201 Elizabeth Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia. HarperCollins. 2008. Print.
