Pain And Suffering In The Giver

Yesterday I was walking down the street when I experienced a minor tragedy; I was stung by a bee. For a moment in my despair I thought, “Oh, how I wish these insects would just die out.” Once the pain went away I realized that the disappearance of bees would be an awful loss. While people would no longer have to deal with bee stings, people would also no longer have flowers. Getting rid of the pain and suffering of the world would not be worth the inevitable loss in beauty and emotion.
Everything is in balance, and it is impossible to have something good without there also being something bad. In The Giver we see a society that has made the decision to destroy emotions, choices, and differences in order to end pain and suffering. At first this world seems like a utopia, no one argues or has pain, but in reality their world is far from perfect. The people have lost the ability to love, the knowledge of history, and the understanding of death. This society has made everything the same, so there is no pain, but there is also no life. As the main character Jonas discovers, “If everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things! A blue tunic, or a red one?”(pg. 97). …show more content…
Without choice, humans have no real life because it has lost its meaning. The people in Jonas’s community never have to ask, “What is my purpose?” Their role has been assigned to them, and it has been suited to match their strengths, making them productive and comfortable. However, it’s the freedom of choice and the knowledge that our successes and failures will be our own that makes life worth living. Life is a risk because it is inevitable that at some point we will fail, but any one of us could possibly do something amazing, something that no committee could have planned for