What's the hardest part of your day? Maybe it's choosing what to wear, or choosing who to hang out with, who to date, or even where to go to college or if to have kids. In the book The Giver everything contrasts these decisions that make us who we are. Everything is truly black and white, right or wrong. At the first glance this may seem like a paradise. However, throughout the course of the book the main character, Jonas discovers that choice is what gives us emotion, personality and humanity. Therefore I believe that The Giver is a dystopia because of the lack of ability to control yourself for the better or worse, and the suppression of humanity. Firstly, the elders in the community make all decisions for the people. This completely eliminates choice of the people and by extension free will. In chapter 4 Jonas states “When he had become an Eight he had been faced with freedom of choice”. Later …show more content…
The Giver states “We’ve never completely mastered sameness, hair like Fiona’s drives them crazy”. This shows the desire for dehumanization in The Community to prevent anything and everything to shatter the illusion of perfection and sameness. Not only do they suppress the people through appearance, going so far as to eliminate color, they also destroy the only emotion that the people are still capable of feeling, love. They coerce the population into taking “the pill” to suppress what we know to be romantic love and sexuality; which are two drivers that cause people to act irrational. The book takes care to illustrate the absence of love in Jonas’s life. His “parents” don't even love each other which i feel is one of the most disturbing parts of the book. To them raising Lily and Jonas is just another role to fulfill in the community. His “mother” even plainly admits that she doesnt love him. This is simply because The Community ruined the human capacity to feel