The Modern Society In Lois Lowery's The Giver

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From terror attacks to poverty and hunger, many problems exist in the modern world. In order to get a hold of the situation of a country, numbers of government has begun to choose to surveillance its own citizens. China is a good example. The country is using many methods to restrict its people’s freedom, including such things as internet restriction and birth control. If the situation gets stricter, China would eventually develop into a country that is very alike to the community Jonas lives in. In the book The Giver published by Lois Lowery, the community has gone to a stage called “Sameness” (111). In other words, Louis Lowery created a brutal world of total control that takes away individual freedom, strong emotions, and most importantly,…show more content…
The biggest difference between the modern world and Jonas’s is that in Jonas’s world, one’s job is decided as an Assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve and starts to prepare that child for their particular job. Jonas was selected to be the next Receiver of Memory, but was feeling fear since he did not understand what he was facing. This kind of feeling increased when he was reading the instructions and preparing for the training. He was stunned since most of the instructions were denying what he was told to do the past twelve years. “The exemption from rudeness startled him.” (93). “He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie.” (94). From the Ceremony to the instructions, Jonas gradually begins to feel that he has been tricked the past twelve years and starts to question the system of the community he lives in. He tries to discover the purpose of life, but only concerns remain. Jonas’s concern becomes bigger during his training with the Giver when he received a memory of Family and learned about the existence of Grandparents. In the community, there is a system for parents whose children have grown up and have become adults. Even…show more content…
The most unforgivable thing the community has done was taking the truth away from the people. The people in the community do not know sunshine or snow, not to mention the other natural phenomenon. Even such things as hills have disappeared because of Sameness. These things were not a “practical thing, so it became obsolete when [Jonas’ world] went to Sameness” (111). The people have forgotten the true way the Earth is working just because it is inconvenient and inefficient, but that was not the only thing they had gave up. The residents of the community were not given the concept of war. In other words, the most unforgivable important history of the human being has taken away from them.What more, a game which works as the same way as the real war exist among the children, but nobody knows what it is representing. Jonas found himself having “a sudden chocking feeling, as if it were difficult for him to breathe” (170) when he found himself recalling the memory of a young boy dying from warfare while watching the other children play the game. Since the comity told only the Receiver of Memory the truth, Jonas suffered sadness and conflict against the others for not understanding the truth. That was not all. Jonas began to find much unease about how the community was running and controlling the people, and how foolish his groupmates were. Jonas was often “irrationally angry at his groupmates, that

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