The Giver and Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry Comparative Essay

Imagine if we were all just pawns in a game out of our control. The themes woven through Gathering Blue (2000) and The Giver (2014) have common threads. Before being faced with the challenges of becoming the Receiver and being weighed down by the Givers work, Jonas believes the world he lives in is a utopia, free of conflict, pain, or strife, and Kira’s village is a very open community with very few rules for the villagers to follow. The novels Gathering Blue and The Giver discuss important themes that cross between both stories: art and creative instinct and feeling and emotion. 

The themes in the stories Gathering Blue and The Giver, both by Lois Lowry, are very similar. One of the themes in Gathering Blue is art and creative instinct. In the story when Kira is given the Singer’s Robe, she is told that it is her job to create the future on the blank space across the back and shoulders of the robe, but then she is also told that she will be told what to put there when the time comes. In this instance, we are shown that the Singer’s Robe symbolizes the way Kira and her friends are being deprived of their creativity and they don’t get to use her creative instinct to the best of their abilities when instead she has been orphaned and taken away for her skills alone. One of the themes in The Giver is feeling and emotion. Every morning in Jonas’s community, the people get injections making them almost numb to having any feeling or emotion at all and even going so far as to remove the people's memories of the past. In this instance, the injections symbolize the people of the community being dispossessed of their emotions and feelings and even their memory for the sole reason of not having any conflict or problems whatsoever in the community. They are being used by the Elders and are having the opportunity to feel anything stolen from them. The Chief Elder said: “People are weak. People are wrong. When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong - every single time.” This quote tells us why they have taken away the people’s feelings, emotions and choices in the community in The Giver. It tells us about how when people have the freedom to choose, they will always choose wrong and in the event that they choose wrong, their emotions could get out of hand which could lead to conflict, pain or strife. This shows us that they have taken away their feelings and emotion for the sole reason of having a perfect community. Kira and her friends are in a similar predicament in Gathering Blue. She, Thomas, and Jo have been told they are to create the future using their gifts in the arts yet are also told that they are to be told what to put in the blank space that is to be the future. Their choice is being taken away from them and they are not able to use their skills and creative instincts the best they possibly can. It is the same as what is happening to Jonas’s community involving their feelings and emotions. The themes in Gathering Blue and The Giver are quite similar in that the characters in both stories are being deprived of something very important to living your life as a person.

Both the stories Gathering Blue and The Giver explore themes that cross over: art and creative instinct and feeling and emotion. In Gathering Blue, Kira and her friends, Thomas and Jo, were deprived of their artistic ability and creative instinct when they were told that it was their job to create the future but they were then told that they will be told what to put in the blank space that is to be the future. In The Giver, Jonas and the people in his community are deprived of their feelings and emotions when they have to take their daily injections, for the sole reason of avoiding conflict, pain, and strife in their community and obtaining a “utopia”. These themes connect the two stories where both the characters are being dispossessed of some very important things in our lives as human beings.