This is my Giver essay that we wrote in Humanities class. After we read The Giver, by Lois Lowry, we all wrote essays and chose themes. I chose the theme of emotions and how Jonas, the main character, and his community don’t really have the same emotions that we have.  I’m really proud of it because I went deep and I made strong connections. I learned all about TEEAC paragraphs and that really helped me in my writing process. I really enjoyed writing it and I think my work reflected that.

Emotions, the Doorway to Individuality

Can you imagine living in a world where all of your emotions are being censored to keep a utopia? In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, the people in power have to suppress the emotions of the citizens to stay in power. Jonas is a 12-year-old boy who lives in a community where all of the normal emotions are subdued. Jonas is different from all of the other people in his Community. He notices things that most other people don’t. When he is chosen to be the Receiver of Memory, he starts to learn about the world before the Community. He learns about color and choices, but he also learns about pain and death. Most importantly, he learns about love. Jonas and The Giver, his trainer, have to decide what to do. Risk their lives for the Community, or let it be. The Elders in Jonas’s Community have to make sure that they stay in power. As long as they are in power, they can keep the people in the Community from having the feelings that we have on a daily basis. When the Community doesn’t have those feelings, the Elders are able to keep the utopia.

In Jonas’s Community, the Elders make sure that all of the people’s feelings are suppressed. By giving the people in the Community the pills for Stirrings and having family units share their feelings, the Elders are using their power to take away the emotions of the people. When the families share their feelings, the parents are able to make the children’s emotions more subdued and not as angry or sad. When The Giver is giving Jonas new memories, Jonas gets a memory with a family in it. He experiences love for the first time.“ ‘Love.’ It was a word and concept new to him,” (Lowry, p. 105). This quote shows that Jonas has no comprehension of what love is. The Elders took all of the love out of the Community when they started giving pills for Stirrings and when they have parents make their children’s emotions more subdued. His parent’s marriage wasn’t based on love at all. It was based on a compatibility test on a computer, which doesn’t mean that they will fall in love. They might fall in love later in their marriage, but that seems unlikely because of how they were married, being pushed together with no previous knowledge of each other. Even if they do fall in love later, it would definitely be expressed in a different way, and might not even be recognized as love. When Jonas asks his mom and dad later in the book if they love him, they are shocked and don’t know how to answer at all. They say that they are proud of his accomplishments and they like to be around him, but they avoid the word love completely. He likes Fiona, but I don’t think that he loves her yet, especially when he is still taking the pills. There is not one place in his Community where he could have witnessed love, except in the memories given to him by the Giver. This relates to the theme utopia. In our society, we experience love in all of our daily lives. For example, I love my family. But in the world that Lois Lowry has created, the Elders took away all of the love, and therefore, all of the individuality and replaced it with monotony and “Sameness.” When you take away all of the individuality, you would be able to create a utopia because there would be no conflicts. Not only do the Elders enforce monotonous feelings throughout the people’s lives, they also raise the children to not have normal emotions to start with.

The Elders in Jonas’s Community are able to have the parents raise the children to not have emotions. Instead of knowledge and feelings, the children are ignorant to the bad things in their Community, like the complete power of the Elders. They still have some feelings, but they are sort of muted, not really what we know emotions to be like in our world. When Jonas is talking to The Giver, they start to talk about Fiona and how she was raised. “Feelings are not part of the life she’s learned,” (Lowry, p. 126). This quote is showing that children in the Community are raised to not have normal emotions. In this society, the children are raised to be normal. There is nothing different about anyone. One of the things that make us each individual in our world is our emotions, because no one has the exact same emotions as anyone else. In the society that Lowry created, most people’s emotions are the same and that is the norm. When Jonas stops taking his pills and starts to feel some of the emotions that we feel, he starts to become more of an individual. The longer the book goes on, the more feeling he starts to experience. Therefore, the more emotions that people have and the more they express them, the more of an individual the person is.

Jonas’s Community functions on the idea that all of the emotions of the people have been taken away by the Elders. As long as the Elders are able to do this, they are able to keep the utopia that they want. In Jonas’s Community, the people don’t have the same emotions that we have regularly. The Elders have taken the emotions out by giving pills and having the parents calm the children down when they have any feelings that are out of the ordinary. When there aren’t any emotions in the world, everyone becomes the same and no one has anything special about them. Emotions are what make us different as people. No two people have the exact same emotions at the exact same time. The reason that we have conflicts in our world is because of difference. The reason we have war and racism and sexism is because we are not all the same. When the difference is taken out of the world, there is no conflict, but there is also no love. When a world has no love, people close off because they don’t care specifically about anyone or anything. Can you imagine living in a world where you don’t have a special connection with anyone? Without love, the world becomes bland and becomes a dystopia. Lowry is saying that we need our emotions to function as a society.