The Giver's Dystopian Society

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.” (Lowry 154) The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is set in a dystopian society in an unspecified time where love, pain, war, greed, jealousy, etc have been abolished and are gone from the society. The only way to see these bad human emotions is to be the Giver or Receiver of Memory. The Giver has every memory from humans before their dystopian society was created. The Receiver of Memory slowly receives the memories over their training. The Giver’s society is run by a small group of Elders. They have tried to abolish individuality and freedom. They also find worlds outside of theirs to be bad or dangerous. The Giver’s dystopian society, set in an unspecified time and place, has abolished the bad ideals and actions of humans, which has turned the humans living there into products of the Elders running it, free of love, faith, and free-will that causes the society’s methods to fail. To

The society is run by the Elders. It is free of deep emotion, with only the Giver and Receiver of Memory having these emotions. They try to keep their community members “safe” from the dangerous outside world. Without the natural human will or individuality, the community failed. The Elders decided that the community would be better without these human emotions and actions, so they use the injections to suppress them. Jonas, in the Giver, states near perfectly why this dystopian community failed, “If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things! A blue tunic, or a red one?” (Lowry 97) Another quote, said by the Giver, was, “‘I love you, Jonas,’ he said. ‘But I have another place to go. When my work here is finished, I want to be with my daughter.’” (Lowry