The Giver Emotional Analysis

Emotion and Feelings in The Giver In the book The Giver the option to feel or have emotions and feelings is not allowed. Like in today’s society, the emotions and feelings have to follow a set of rules and are controlled by an ejection or medication. The people of Jonas’s community don't understand emotion or pain, because their lives allow no chance to experience it. Birthmothers are not allowed to raise their own children or even see them after birth. Sexual interactions are not allowed and sexual urges are medicated away by the mandatory daily injections. Adults are not allowed to choose their own partners and life for these individuals are like nothing we see in the world today. Jonas realizes late in the book that these feelings are better …show more content…
Her dad had been gone for maybe twenty minutes and these medical professionals were shoving depression issues and counseling down her throat. She had told me later that she wasn’t able to show her emotions at the hospital that day because she didn’t want the doctors to think she was depressed and needed help to grieve over the loss of her father. As months went but she handled herself better, like any one would after losing a close relative, but it still hurt her that she was not able to express her feelings the way she needed to after the death. In the book death is not registered as death itself, it is instead called being released. People are released in the book if they can’t fulfill their jobs, if they are too old, and if they have a birth defect or are a twin. These reasons for release are to try to maintain the “sameness” in the community. Being released in the book is just part of life as dying is in real life. When Jonas gets his memories he realized that releasing is actually killing. He says on page 188 “He killed it. My father killed it.”, talking about Gabriel. Here Jonas is expressing feelings that would not normally be present if he would have been taking his injections or medications. I feel that this book reflects the issues in the real world in the way that people are supposed to act. As stated in the previous …show more content…
Ethan Kross and other authors states in their article, Coping with emotions past: The neural bases of regulating affect associated with negative autobiographical, “The ability to adaptively cope with distressing life experiences is a key self-regulatory challenge.”, meaning that memories are very hard and emotional parts of life and are very hard to emotionally deal with. Memories of war, childhoods, and feelings of pain, pleasure, and love and are all memories that are not part of this book because, once again, they are not allowed. Memories and peoples past are what makes a person the way they are inside. On page 154, in The Giver, the giver states, "The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories NEED to be shared". The giver holds all of the memories of the past and he has nobody to share them with except for the next person that is chosen to be the new giver, however previous attempts to train a different giver failed because of the memories he chooses to share with her first. On page 85 in the gook, the giver says, "I started you with memories of pleasure. My previous failure gave me the wisdom to do that" this meaning that his last attempt to train a new giver failed because of the horrible memories of the past world and lives of the people in the community. The giver decided to share good memories with Jonas first so that he understood what the meaning and