The Giver Research Paper

Bryan Lee The Giver Final Period: 3 Well-known for its utopian society, The Giver by Lois Lowry is a highly controversial book in primary schools. The Giver is about a “perfect” world where fear, differences, conflict, and pain is eliminated. The simplest way to form this society was to take away the memories that everyone once had. The protagonist, Jonas, is the new Receiver of Memories that has to receive memories of the past from the current Giver. Jonas doesn’t realize that the community needs these memories until he realizes that Release is euthanasia, and the community don’t even know what they are doing is wrong. Many of the complaints that The Giver is getting includes, but not limited to the fact that there’s euthanasia, and that the book is negative for children. However, The Giver doesn’t express Release (euthanasia) in a neutral or positive way, and it isn’t a negative …show more content…
However, love was taken from the community so that it won’t cause problems. Love in the real world will cause pain, jealously, and in some cases, murder. So in a utopian world where everything is “perfect”, things that can cause conflict such as love and feelings are taken away from the citizens. Jonas had asked The Giver, “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong? (Lowry 98)”. Even Jonas understood the dangers of making decisions and having real love. Later on, Jonas decides to bring love back to the community, because he chose to release all of the memories that he held to make life more meaningful in the community. Decisions were taken away from the people along with pain and other aspects that we would want to get rid of by the creators. In other words, The Giver is not a negative book since love, emotions, and memories was only taken away from this utopian society to make it “perfect” and problem