What Is Perfection In The Giver

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” In “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, they did exactly this to achieve utter “perfection”. In this novel, the main goal of this society was to keep everything perfect, no matter what. The government would do absolutely anything to keep their society “faultless”. They took every flaw, and every ounce of pain away. Instead of dealing with that pain, they cultivated a seemingly perfect facade and a seemingly perfect society. The problem with this is, nobody is flawless, even the protagonist of the novel. To make this society perfect, the weight of every struggle in the history of mankind was put on Jonas’s shoulders. But, the only thing that resulted from this was anarchy. From this I learned that although perfection is desirable, it is not attainable. To eliminate the problem of imperfect people, they killed off those who didn’t conform. If there were two twins, the one who weighed less would be killed off. A small child, a baby would be killed just because they weighed less than their sibling. The only reason they were killed was because they looked the same as their

Lois Lowry made it so that the tones of most who live in this society are serious and lacking emotion. This shows that this “perfect” society isn’t perfect, because the people living within it aren’t happy. But, what truly conveyed this theme was the use of imagery. Lois Lowry described the scenery in a bleak, melancholy way. But, when Jonas can finally see color, the scenery is described in a more happy, exciteful way. This shows that when society becomes completely orthodox, the world looks and feels hopeless to its inhabitants, but they never realize this fact because they have never experienced anything different than their world of