The Giver Essay

The Giver Essay

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain, or past,” Lois Lowry describing a dystopia. In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Jonas and his community live in a dystopia, where there is no color, pain, or past and nothing unexpected. In The Giver, Jonas’s community appears as a perfect world, where families share their feelings and food is delivered straight to the front door. However, as the story continues Jonas receives his job Receiver of the Memory where he receives memories from the former Receiver of the Memory, The Giver. These memories make Jonas realize that his world is not so perfect after all. He starts to become uncomfortable with his dystopian world.   To sum it up, Jonas’s community is a dystopia because citizens live under harsh control and strict rules, citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance, and Jonas is one of the few to question the goodness of his society.  
To begin with, Jonas’s community is a dystopia because they live under harsh control and strict rules. Throughout the book, a series of rules and harsh control is displayed from the community. At one point in the book, Jonas gets in trouble for the smallest incident, “Immediately he had been taken aside for a brief private lesson in language precision. He was not starving, it was pointed out. He was hungry. No one in the community was starving, had ever been starving, would ever be starving. To say “starving” was to speak a lie” (Lowry 70). Jonas got into trouble for saying the word “starving”. If someone were to say “I’m starving” in our world, it would be considered as if someone said “I’m hungry”, just an exaggeration. However, to say a lie, is a big rule in Jonas’s community. It wouldn’t be right for anyone to get into trouble for saying a lie, whether they had to or they didn’t. Lies are part of life, but Jonas’s dystopia won’t accept that. In conclusion, strict rules and harsh rules don’t make...