Here is one more reaction regarding the The Giver written by one of my students as part of their assignment for summer reading.
Both these are posted in the original form as submitted by the students without any editing by me.
Enjoy!
Mark
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The Giver
By H. T.
The summer reading book I have read was The Giver written by Lois Lowry. The reason why I decided to read this was that I was interested in “controlled society” for safety after I read comments of this book on the Amazon’s site. Though this book was a juvenile book, the content was thought-provoking.
The world in this story seems to be a utopia because there is no something nuisance and harmful such as weather or warfare. Instead, many things there are controlled. For example, the families in The Community are not “real” families. Their spouses are decided by “Committee of Elders.” It is also decided how many children they may have and these children are all born from “Birthmothers”, which is one of the jobs in The Community. Even jobs are controlled. Each December, all children will grow a year old at “The Ceremony”, which means they don’t have their birthdays. Especially at The Ceremony of Twelve those children who are going to be twelve years old are given “Assignments”, which shows what your jobs are. Jonas got the Assignment of “The Receiver of Memory.” There are only two Receivers in the community, Jonas and The Giver, who is an ex-Receiver. Jonas had to receive the memories of the past and feelings, for example warfare, colors, pain or love in order to advise everyone when something people hadn’t expected happened. At first time Jonas thought this job was excellent but gradually he thought these memories should be shared by everyone. Then he did the plan to spread the memories.
I think the main theme of this story is "what happiness is." After I read this story, I didn't tell which society was good for human, the society of this story or real one. It is true that the controlled society like this story's is not interesting, at least for us, because everything is the same and there is no change. Precisely because in Jonas's world they are doing the same thing again and again every day, I think he said that he thought there was only now. The past and the future can make us feel the purpose of living, for example trying to earn more money to buy a house and so on. Human just living in their whole life seems to be a "robot!" However, "un-sameness" and, the past and the future can make us feel not only happy but also threatened and anxious. These sometimes damage people, for example records or memories of war can lead another war as the revenge. And another reason why I cannot say which society I like better is that I cannot imagine the life in the society like The Community without memory of pain or of happiness.
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