“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It 's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared” (Lowry 154). This quote from The Giver by Lois Lowry is an example of how the protagonist, Jonas, thought he lived in an ideal society until he got his Assignment, which was really his career. In his career he got all of the memories of the past, before his community decided to change the way they lived their lives and performed their daily functions. In doing so, Jonas figured out that his society was not so perfect after all, and that it did have drawbacks. Since the challenge with utopia is that in order to have one people must give up many privileges, a dystopian society might have different techniques of punishment, types of families, and ways to deal with the elders of the society. Punishment is a way to teach one about mistakes. In The Giver, the community punished the children with a weapon that stung when it was used on them. This is similar to when school teachers used to be allowed to slap children’s wrists with a ruler, but it was not as harsh a punishment. When Jonas is reflecting on a memory of his friend Asher he explains, “The punishment used for small children was a regulated system of smacks with the discipline wand: a thin, flexible weapon that stung painfully when it was wielded. The Childcare specialists were trained very carefully in the discipline methods: a quick smack across the hands for a bit of minor behavior; three sharper smacks on