Power In The Giver

Leadership is a designated constructive force that is designed to benefit individuals through empowerment, asserting delegated power in a beneficial manner that ensures unity, whereas authority may also act to restrict one’s freedom and deprive them of individuality. Within any particular text, power may be wielded in both a destructive and constructive manner, whilst leadership, functioning as a constructive form of authority, only proves to inspire and assist those it influences. This is distinctly portrayed in Peter Weir’s film, Dead Poet’s Society (DPS), and Lois Lowry’s novel, The Giver, each presenting coinciding empowering and oppressing forms of influence.
Whilst authority may suppress individuality, leadership functions to embolden …show more content…
The Giver is established in a dystopian future where an ostensibly flawless community devoid of diversity, hardship or choice exists, enforced by a dictatorship-type authority known as ‘the elders’, and demurred by the leadership of ‘the giver’, and his pupil, Jonas. Throughout the narrative, symbolism is utilised in the motif of the colour red to epitomise the overwhelming emotion, stifled by the elders’ astringent regime for uniformity, that Jonas experiences, originally established by the apple, “the apple had changed… but it was the same apple… the same size and shape”. Following the apple, Jonas’s first glimpse of colour and his initial step to overcoming the stifling to be enlightened and empowered by the Giver, euphemisms are revealed to further his realisation of the flaws of authority. The concept of ‘release’, a facetious euphemism of death, is depicted as the Giver reveals Jonas’s father obediently euthanising a baby; “he went limp… (his) father killed it!”, empowering Jonas to enact change. The influential power of authority is further represented using simplistic language, expressing the malleability of Jonas’s mind; “Jonas was beginning to feel frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought”; and demonstrating the ability for both destructive authority and leadership to have an impact on his beliefs and subsequent actions, using truncated sentences. Finally, foreshadowing is utilised through the initial memory of freedom and exhilaration; “he was sitting on a thing called sledge… breathless glee overwhelmed him”. The symbolically red sledge presents his final step to obtaining freedom from authority for both himself and the community, resulting from the empowerment the Giver