The Giver Literary Analysis Essay

📌Category: Books, The Giver
📌Words: 1133
📌Pages: 5
📌Published: 22 April 2022

Louis Lowry’s The Giver is a novel that traces the quest of a boy named Jonas who has to cope with being in a society where choice is limited and government control is maximized. He is raised to conform to the rules of his community but after gaining insight of the past, he realizes how much of a dystopian society he lives in and finds it better to leave altogether to achieve freedom. Lowry uses memories of the past to develop Jonas’s disapproval of the community and as a whole, he changes his perception of what is acceptable and disgraceful morally. With his newfound comprehension of his community within the context of the past, Jonas makes his decision to leave.  Therefore, Louis Lowry develops themes in the book by growing Jonas as a character. Ultimately, The Giver has important recurring themes of conformity, pain, and the power of ignorance compared to knowledge. 

In The Giver by Louis Lowry, a paramount theme she discusses heavily is the concept of conformity. Everybody in Jonas’s community has to be the same, and any difference is discouraged. This ‘golden rule’ is brought up many times in the book as Jonas struggles with having to quadrate with everyone else when he knows more than them and yearns to be different. For example, when Lily (Jonas’s little sister) points out that the baby Gabriel has the same eye color as Jonas which puts them apart from the rest of the community, Jonas explains how “It was considered rude to call attention to things that were unsettling or different about individuals” (Lowry 20). Jonas having different colored eyes as everyone else in the community makes him different from them, and since differences are shunned in the community, his eye color should not be discussed for fear of making him stand out. Throughout the book, however, Jonas understands that difference isn’t always bad. After a conversation with The Giver, Jonas comes to the sudden realization that, “If everything’s the same, there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!” (Lowry 97). This revelation emphasizes how Jonas was once someone in the community who played into the Sameness and conformed to what was expected of him. Through time, he realizes that making decisions and being free to be different should be a normality in his society, and this sparks the change in character he faces on his journey to find ‘the truth’. 

Furthermore, Louis Lowry makes the motif of pain abundantly clear because she constantly brings up the pain both Jonas and The Giver have to face and keep to themselves. Jonas has to take in memories from the Giver about how the world was, and the truth behind the decisions of the community to live the way they do. These memories include inherently acceptable things like color, love, and music, but they also contain grim memories such as war, hunger, and the carnage of innocent people. The Giver and Jonas have to carry a lot of pain from these memories, and it is evident the memories are taking a toll on them because Jonas concludes that the other people in the community, “Have never known pain. The realization made him feel desperately lonely” (Lowry 110). Jonas now understands that his pain is something the rest of his community will never understand because he has to keep all the pain to himself. Therefore, through the theme of pain, Jonas starts feeling ostracized by his community. Another example of this is when The Giver explains to Jonas what their actual job as Receivers is: to carry the pain of the community so they don’t have to face it by themselves. The Giver concludes that “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain, it is the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared” (Lowry 154). This dialogue was captured right after Jonas understands that releasing is the government’s way of saying ‘mass killing of innocent people’, revealing that Jonas has completely rebelled against the community and dislikes their way of living as he deems it morally wrong. This sort of direct criticism of the community would’ve never even crossed his mind at the beginning of the book, so his knowledge of the memories is changing him as a person.

Although the book is genius enough, Louis Lowry combines the ideas of both pain and conformity into the imperative theme of ignorance compared to knowledge. In Jonas’s community, the ignorance of believing the community is a utopia means blissful citizens protected by a lie. Jonas, however, has cognizance of what the community is, accordingly resulting in him being upset because he is no longer protected by the falsehood the committee tries to trap him in. The wisdom of the past is necessary to make decisions for the future but because the community doesn’t have access to that knowledge, they are resistant to change resulting in them being happy with the status quo. Jonas has access to information about the past, so he can understand that being ignorant and happy is not as valuable as being knowledgeable and upset. In the Christmas scene where he gains the evocation of love and family, Jonas understands that “It wouldn’t work well.” He directly says, “I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it’s much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live.” While he does negate the idea of change altogether, Jonas can not deny the fact that he favors the feeling because he says, “I wish we still had that” (Lowry 122-123).  It appears as though Jonas still has the mindset of ‘change is bad and is still under the influence of the community’s rules. This changes though after he leaves the community with Gabriel. “Once he had yearned for a choice. Then, when he had had a choice, he had made the wrong one: the choice to leave. And now he was starving. But if he had stayed… His thoughts continued. If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love” (Lowry 174). Jonas’s moment of actuality that it is better to be suffering and aware of the situation than unaware and happy means that he has finally broken away from the influence of the community. Before, he agreed with what the community was saying because he didn’t have enough knowledge about the past yet, but after learning about how terrible the community is, the need to be free outweighed his fear of breaking the rules. 

Categorically, the themes developed by Louis Lowry in The Giver are of Jonas learning what true conformity is and its effects on society, how the community makes him and the Giver suffer alone, and how ignorance is bliss while knowledge is power. These themes make him understand the community better, allowing him to conduct a conclusion on whether or not it is an acceptable way to live. They develop through Jonas’s experience compared to the other people in the community. To Summarize,  The Giver has important recurring themes of conformity, pain, and the power of ignorance compared to knowledge, and they are what causes Jonas to conclude that the community is unfavorable.

+
x
Remember! This is just a sample.

You can order a custom paper by our expert writers

Order now
By clicking “Receive Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails.