The Giver Dystopia

Think of a world where there is no freedom, and yet, its a utopia. The main character of The Giver by, Lois Lowry named Jonas, lives in this aforementioned world. By the end of the book, Jonas would describe his world as a dystopia. Jonas lives in what he calls the community, where the government chooses the jobs, supplies the food, stalks and watches over its citizens, imposes strict and unforgiving laws, regulates everything, prevents differences among people, and both condemns and allows lies. Most citizens of the community would call it a utopia. At the beginning of the novel, Jonas is one such naive citizen. However, Jonas changes throughout The Giver and as a result, tries to change the community.

At the beginning of the book, Jonas is

However, he was wise at the end. Jonas’s naivety was evident when Jonas was thinking about volunteer hours and how they were always important to him because the other hours of the day were regulated heavily. This shows that Jonas is naive because he does not know that having very little free choice is not normal, and that most people from the time before him had the freedom to choose how they spent their time, “The freedom to choose where we spend those hours had always seemed a wonderful luxury to Jonas” (Page: 26). Another example came later in the book as Jonas was talking to The Giver about color and quickly rebukes the community that they should not have eliminated color. The example shows how Jonas was naive because he did not know all of the evils that the world had created by means of color. He did not know the effects of color on the world throughout history. Eventually, jonas’s naivety gave way to wisdom after he had learned about the previous world. Wisdom was shown later in the novel after Jonas learned about both the freedoms and restrictions of the old world. At one point, after Jonas has not taken the pills for four weeks and has nearly been The Receiver for one year, Jonas realises that the feelings that the community experiences are just shells of what feelings really are. As he reflects on this, he learns that the sharing of emotions ceremony at the end of the day, would be useless in