Theme of Pressure in The Giver Essay Example

As Shirley Henderson once said, “There is so much pressure on kids these days to be the best at everything.” In our society, the pressure that everyone puts on people to stand out and succeed is a great amount. The overwhelming amount of pressure put on people in America has made their happiness take a slide. In this country, there is an abundant amount of pressure that is put upon people to try to be a standout. However, in The Giver, the people that live in the community are expected to try and not be different. 

I even have experience with these pressures during my sports career, as all coaches expect every one of their kids to become the best. Everyone wants people to be the best in the world, and if they fall short of their expectations they can downgrade them as a person. The pressure of being perfect can be overwhelming, therefore, there should be a fine line between high standards and unrealistic expectations (Colorado Boulder). The people who give off all of the pressure to people should realize the difference between achievable goals and impractical goals. The belief that people must succeed at everything they do is impractical and can cause more harm than good (Colorado Boulder). Setting unrealistic goals for someone can give them more pressure than is needed because it is based on what they want, more than what they can actually achieve. If someone has an unrealistic goal for themselves, and they don’t end up reaching it they could feel like a disappointment or failure. 

The pressures that people have in America to live the American Dream has taken the United States all the way down to the 19th most happy country in the world.  According to Desmond Tutu, “The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.” This proves that the stress that people feel to try to become the best can be overwhelming and sometimes can lead to more serious problems. “The American dream, you see, is a fantasy, a myth that relies on stories like mine to distract us from the American machine, the conveyor belt that leads most young people, especially from neighborhoods like mine, from nothing to nowhere, while picking off the chosen few, like me” (Gerald). This shows people that although some people can live the American dream, most people face all of the pressure to do it but ultimately don’t ever reach their goals. 

In America, there are not a lot of things that are chosen for people, as people have the right to become whatever kind of person that they want to.“You Elevens have spent all your years till now learning to fit in, to standardize your behavior, to curb any impulse that might set you apart from the group” (Lowry 65). This exhibits that people who live in their community are forced to live similar lives. The only portion of their life that could be different is when they experience their job selection. While people in the community ultimately end up with different jobs, they all take the same path to get there when they are growing up. They also differ from America in the fact that they have their jobs chosen for them, rather than being like the United States and having the free will to choose an occupation. 

Rather than the community members embracing their slight differences, they are forced to only focus on the things they have in common. “It was the sort of thing one didn’t ask a friend about because it might have fallen into that uncomfortable category of “being different” (Lowry 48). In our world, people want to stand out and be different. People want to be different because everyone thinks that being the same as everyone else is boring. Everyone in our world is unique because of the different things they have experienced during their life, which then shapes who they become as a person. In the book, members of the community look the same, eat the same meals, and even live in similar-looking dwellings. Those are all examples of things people in our world strive to be different at. The people who are fortunate enough to live the American Dream want to be the best looking, they want to go out and eat luxurious meals, and they unquestionably want the biggest mansion that everyone looks at in awe. Once kids see all of these things that they can have if they live out their dream, they put their emotions under constraint as they try to achieve perfection.

The Law of Jante is very similar to the laws in this book, as it states that people are not to stand out and not to think that they are anything special.  “There was never any comfortable way to mention or discuss one’s successes without breaking the rule against bragging, even if one didn’t mean to” (Lowry 34). In The Giver, they aren’t even allowed to brag about something good that they did, symbolizing that the people who make the rules don't want anyone to stand out from one another. America’s individualistic culture gives out a lot of social pressure to people to pursue their personal achievements. “Swedes on the other hand remain relatively unnoticed when they reach something extraordinary. They are less prone to bragging. This is because they follow a common rule called the Jantelagen. Basically it says that You are not better than anyone else”(Kamann). This shows that in some parts of the world some laws have similarities with those in the book. The Swedish people all know the rules of how they should not stand out, and they conform to them just as the people in the book’s community conform to their set of behavioral rules.

Every day kids in America watch TV and see at least one story about how someone has started from the bottom and ended up rising to the top. This can lead to kids putting too much pressure on themselves to try and be a superstar, topped with all of the extra pressure that everyone else gives them. It can be disappointing to people when they realize that not everyone can live the American Dream, and sometimes it leads people astray down a bad path for the rest of their life. “That a kid in my neighborhood is expected to earn $21,000 a year, less than their parents were expected to make, that 13 million American children live in households without enough to eat, that one in 30 don't have a stable household at all” (Gerald). If someone from Gerald’s neighborhood were to also make it out and live a joyous life, that would be the definition of living the American Dream as they would have climbed the social ladder to the top all the way from the bottom rung. In America, there is a great deal of pressure put on people to climb up the so-called social ladder, yet in The Giver, there aren’t many levels to their community. Their community life is very organized, as they are governed by the ideals of sameness. Although the community has the Elders, who make decisions for the community, they still have to follow the system of rules that were put in place by their ancestors. 

To conclude, Americans have a profusion of pressure put on them to try and stand out, yet in The Giver, their residents are expected to conform to the rules of not being different. “No one mentioned such things; it was not a rule, but was considered rude to call attention to things that were unsettling or different about individuals” (Lowry 25, 26). This indicates that in their community there isn’t much difference between individuals because they make it such a big deal to not call attention to something that wasn’t the same. In America, people put a lot of pressure on other people to rise up and live the American Dream, yet the majority of people never reach the top. In The Giver, most of the things that happen in their life are chosen for them. However, in our society, people are free to choose what they want to make of their lives.