The Giver

In a self-contained community lives eleven-year-old Jonas. This community differs from real life settings. Citizens receive primary duties and adhere to community's regulations. Transgressors are chastised regardless of their age. There is uniformity in everything, from appearance to experience. Freedom does not exist because no one is aware of it. Religion is also nonexistent yet everyone lives in harmony because there is only one group called "the elders" who decide what is right and wrong; what is good and evil. Every child who turns twelve acquires a vocation suitable to his or her capacity and personality. Upon reaching the age of twelve, Jonas is assigned the single most important role, the giver. However, during his training Jonas discovers that outside the community there is life completely discordant from what he is exposed to. That people in this kind of life experience all sorts of emotions foreign to him. Finally, Jonas makes sudden decision to escape.

This is a valued reading for youths and adults as well. The repercussion of Jonas' escape is a healthy fodder for dialogue between parent and child. As part of his Language Arts project, my son has to make a movie poster based on a particular story. Co-incidentally, he picked up this book. Not only he and Jonas are the same age, they also have similar disposition.

This book sets the stage for a utopian society, and it's very believable. Who's to say that this couldn't really happen sometime in the future? However, what I really liked about this book, is that once Jonas found himself, he wasn't afraid to take action and stand up for what he knew was right. Loved it. The first time I read it was the sixth grade, and I still enjoy it. It's one of my favorite books of all time, it's a relatively quick read for an adult, but it really makes you think.

The Giver presents the reader to a dystopian society that has forayed the people's right to CHOICE in an odious fashion; but nonetheless, it can at times be furtively appealing in an hypnotic way. To analyze this society initially it is quite inscrutable to identify how a people could so ardently support such an articulated "guidance." While this book is merely fiction, it indeed sheds light on an ideology that either is intrinsically intelligent, or it is quite eloquently repugnant to the nebulous of human desire, freedom to endeavor. Being a Constitutionalist I prefer the latter rather than the former. To have one's perspective sculpted and wrought by a fashion of governmental control by means of familial degradation and division from a biological existence, sexual drive altered by compulsory pharmaceuticals, intricate scheduling of one's day, standards and virtues that are ubiquitous, one all encompassing day of "birth", population control, genetic manipulation, and procuring children and spouses by application and approval only, is quite destitute of any CHOICE. Is this inane? Is this madness? Or, if freedom was not known in the context that of which is lain before us in the U.S. Constitution-which both Republicrats and Demopublicans are obscuring-would this dystopia be so divisive? The society in this book is something one could indeed marvel by pretext to the actual context due to the lack of tyrannical behavior. We must not be disillusioned. We must not allow the propagators' evidence and statistical datum to dissuade us from having the penchant to pursue freedom as a virtue over security. For such a society in essence, no matter success, does indeed revoke the core and foundations of an inalienable right that our predecessors have fought eons for-FREEDOM! Articulating political structure is arduous and elicits much dissension along the way; however, do not let that make one despondent or draw forth consternation or political apathy. For if political structure, by and for the people, becomes a derelict, then for our children FREEDOM will be merely a vestige. Or, perhaps a more formidable coin, an antiquated myth.

Lowry has definitely deserved to be upon the list of writer's that has hit a symphonic political note. While not as fecundated as George Orwell's (Eric Blair) writing, she has a latent exhortation for us, or at least for me. The book also has a rendition upon perspective of reality and that will certainly shift the tides of what constitutes this book's yield. I would suggest everyone to read this book, along with other dystopian and utopian classics. Each of those titles have their own way of exorcising the demons from both forms of society.

The end did irritate me slightly, I wanted a more pronounced and clarified ending. Nonetheless, following with the book's thesis, THE MATTER OF CHOICE, Lowry leaves it to the reader to bestow your interpretation; which is elating for some and exacerbating for others. My ending was grim which was evoked by random forethought rather than by intention.

As a teacher of learning disabled students...I can say that all of my pupils loved this book. Some of the ideas might need a bit of explaining, but it is a story that kids can really get into.

It's a bit difficult to put into words how I felt about Lowry's The Giver. The first thing that came to mind and just wouldn't go away is "horrific". And though one can't really be caught surprised with the unfolding of events since Lowry, as a measure of her skill as a storyteller, quite expertly built up the climax, there's still a part of me that kept thinking, "Surely it wouldn't be so bad..."

Of course, it was inevitable that this seemingly eerily perfect world she created would topple. And it was all brought about by the power of memories and one's yearning for love. It made me realize that I've never felt so perplexed and awed by a story in a long while.

Certainly dialectic and begging for a multitude of interpretations, The Giver is another one of those worthy reads that dared to explore, among other things, the boundaries of threshold a person can reach, along with one's capacity to break free of bonds just to truly realize what it is to be human.