Giver Essay
In Humanities, we read a book called The Giver by Lois Lowry, a book about a dystopian society where people are unknowingly forced to live a life that is exactly the same, and nothing can ever happen. I’m proud of it because it focuses on psychological problems with society, which is very interesting for me. I also started a topic that no one has done before, dehumanization. We spent a while working on it, and I’ve spent a long time editing and making this essay.
What Makes Someone Human?
By Armant L’Heureux
What would your life be like if you never knew what emotions were, and didn’t know about the world outside your home? What if you didn’t realize that you didn’t know? That is everyone’s life in the world of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Jonas, a kid in a homogeneous society, where everyone is forced to be the same without knowledge of it, has a gift that shows difference from his friends. He sees what real emotions are, not the fake ones that his community supplies, such as when someone scrapes a knee or plays a game. In a community that subtly enforces perfection, the authorities strive to make it a utopia by eliminating all feelings. Jonas, the new Receiver of Memory, is the only who can see the world how it’s meant to be seen.
Jonas is the only person who knows what feelings are. One night, after Jonas got home from the Annex, where he learned what actual love was, he asked his parents if they loved him. “Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s almost obsolete,’ his mother explained carefully. Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory.” (Lowry p .106). In this quote, Jonas asked his parents if they loved him, and they didn’t know what he meant, then chastised him for improper speech. This shows how people have no idea what feelings are, and Jonas is the only person who knows how what the world naturally is. His parents said that love was meaningless, but it is the most meaningful memory that he has, but because the community eliminates all feelings, they don’t know what it really means. Jonas just wants to help, but can he really change how people see the world?
Once Jonas finds out what emotions are, he refuses to live like he was supposed to. After Jonas is shown how amazing it felt to be happy and to love someone, after his parents said that love was meaningless, he knew he would never be like everyone around him. “But he knew he couldn’t go back to the world of no feelings that he had lived in for so long.” (Lowry p. 108). “This shows how Jonas thinks that having happiness is better than living without it, even if to have happiness, you have to go through sadness and anger. The boundaries that the authorities set were too far, no color, no love, no happiness, but on the other side, no pain. Jonas struggled without end to bring feelings to the community, but after so much pain, he decides to leave the community, the only way to let feelings into the dystopian utopia.
Although people in Jonas’s community were blind to physical pain, they had the pain of being blind, even to that pain. Color, joy, happiness, love, no one knew what those were, nor how to feel them. The community was called a utopia, but it was just a dystopia with everything hidden from them. Death, pain, sorrow, guilt, no one would ever know how to feel them. Jonas knows what war and pain are, but he also knows what love and happiness are, and he wants to show people the feelings that they bring, but everyone refused to accept that their lives were hidden away from them. If you had the choice to live in a world, blind from feelings, would you? No war in exchange for love. No hunger, but no joy. What is a “perfect world?” Jonas believes that it is one full of history and memories, where people can experience both good and bad. That is what a perfect world is to him.