The Giver Literary Analysis

"Jonas felt a ripping sensation inside himself, the feeling of terrible pain clawing its way forward to emerge in a cry.” The dictionary entry of the word “dystopia” states, “an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.” This basically means that it’s an imaginary place that is nothing but a horrifying and an unbearable place to be in, which typically has a government that doesn’t allow any sort of freedom. In The Giver, Jonas’s community was perfect. No one had to deal with pain or fear. People didn’t choose their own jobs, the community leaders did. Jonas was assigned as The Receiver, in which he received memories from the past Receiver. As he encountered these

Jonas has been assigned as The Receiver of Memory; he was told by the Chief Elder that his training would be painful, and it was. The Giver, the past Receiver, gave Jonas the memories that he had. There were memories that included pain and violence. But there were also memories of joy and caring people, which was what the Giver gave to Jonas so he would be determined to continue his training. This made Jonas realize how his community didn’t have any color, any freedom, or any real sense of a family. There was no one in his society that actually cared for him, except for the Giver. In Jonas’s world, people couldn’t see color because leaders in the past took it away. Jonas strongly believes they shouldn’t have removed color. A piece of evidence that proves this is after the Giver talks to Jonas that people decided to take away color. He responded, “We shouldn’t have!” (Lowry 95). This reveals that Jonas likes being able to see color, and that he is upset that people thought differently and took out the ability for every other person to see it. He strongly thinks the people shouldn’t have removed color because through the memories Jonas was able to receive, he could see wonders filled with colors. When he learned this about his community, this made him question whether or not it was really “perfect,” and if this is a community worth spending his whole life in. Now that Jonas knows the truth about his community, he started to become careless about