Louie Figliulo Humanities

Giver Essay October 2014

The Power of Knowledge

      Power and Control

  Imagine a world where you have no choices because the people in power are making them for you. In the Giver by Lois Lowry there is a boy who has pale eyes and can see… beyond. This boy is named Jonas.  All of the jobs in Jonas’s community are assigned but there is one job that is the most important, the Receiver of Memory. As a Receiver he gains memories of the past from the Giver. By being the Receiver, Jonas finds out the truth. Jonas has trouble because he finds out that his community Elders are lying. They are shaping people’s lives because the Elders are making choices for the citizens. He wants to tell the rest of the people in his community the truth. Though the citizens believe they are living in a utopia, select people in Jonas’ community have power that no one knows about and that makes it a dystopia.

In Jonas’s Community the people who have power are the Elders. The Elders make up the rules and they enforce them.  For example, the Elders made up a rule that the people in the community can’t lie. Only one person in the community able to lie, the Receiver. “You may lie” (pg 57).  In Jonas’ community everyone follows the rules as they’re supposed to. Though Jonas is allowed to lie, he’s afraid to because his whole life he’s been told lying is bad and against the community rules. Everyone follows the community rules because it’s what they’ve known since they were assigned their families. They also believe it makes a utopia.

The Elders are trying to make a utopia, but the reality is they have created a dystopia. In The Giver there is a dictatorship because the Elders are the only ones who make the decisions because they hold all of the power. They create rules that block love and emotion and control everyone’s life. In conclusion the Elders have the most power… that the community knows of.

The Receiver and the Giver have power that the rest of the community does not know about. The Receiver and the Giver can give everyone the memories and they remind the Elders what happened when there was war and joy. They also can decide the fate of the community. The Giver gives advice to the Elders. “Sometimes I wish they’d ask for my wisdom more often—there are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don’t want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable—so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen”” (82). This quote shows that the Giver has the knowledge and power to change the community but the Elders don’t want him to. He can tell the Elders what to do and he can chose what memory to tell them. In conclusion Jonas and the Giver have the real power. Though the Giver has power he does not act on it. At the end Jonas does by leaving the border to release his morrories into the community.

In Jonas’ community the Elders have power that everyone knows about, but they keep the truth from the citizens. Therefor this is a dystopia. The Giver and the Receiver have power that no one knows about and the Elders are making sure that the citizens don’t find out. The Elders want to make a utopia by making everyone the same, but by doing so they have created a dystopia. In a very popular book called Divergent by Veronica Roth the same thing is happening. Everyone believes they are living in a utopia but it is a dystopia. It is worlds like this that make you wonder if anything is “perfect.” If you found out the truth then wouldn’t you want to fight the power?

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