What do you think of the young adult novel, The Giver? I read it last fall for school and loved it. Now I’m reading The Anthem and have noticed the great similarites between those two books.
It’s been a long long time since I’ve read it, but I remember loving it enough to finish it a month before the class. It definitely created my love of dystopian stories.
I like it quite a bit, but I have a problem with the sequels, which I have also read.
I think that it is quite clear from the closing passage that Jonas and the baby do not make it and that they are, in fact, dying. However, it is left to the reader to interpret it from the text. In fact, it is actually a good test of a students ability to infer, something they are just learning to do at the age the book is aimed at.
At most, it is supposed to be ambiguous for the reader. Lowry used to not answer the question regarding their survival.
However, Lois Lowry went ahead and showed that the kid(and his baby brother) lived in the Messenger, the second sequel, which I really disliked.
How is it quite clear? I thought it was 50/50.
Mahaloth, I haven’t read the sequels but I have heard complaints about them.
When I was younger, I don’t think I thought they died. Or at least, I don’t remember what I thought. But when I reread it a few weeks ago, my impression was that it seemed they did die. Or at least, it didn’t look good.
I really enjoyed it, too, and it inspired me, also, to read other dystopian books as I got older. I like how ideal the community seems at first and then slowly, it all just seems to look so hollow and…creepy.
Never saw that, myself. Seemed obvious to me that they made it to the town and survived.
I thought it was a great book, although I wanted a little more from it plot- and length-wise. Felt like it was just getting started, like a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits Gotcha! plot twist. Gathering Blue seemed about right to me. I really liked the characters in the Messenger, but it seemed a bit too pat, all in all.
I read it in the beginning of the 6th grade, a few years after it was published. Haven’t read it since, but I remember really, really liking it because it felt like the first “adult” type of book I ever read. The word I would learn later to describe it would be dystopian. Other books I read before then were a lot more upbeat and nothing that bad really happens. Ot if they do, it’s more like a fantasy thing like * Jurassic Park*. Huck Finn would have been my darkest read up to that point, but that ended with everything being tied up on a happy note. The Giver was just something else from what I read before.
Also, I would have been around Jonas’ age when I read it and it was pretty interesting that he has a wet dream about the girl he likes.
Honestly, I didn’t like it. I found it to be average writing, which was ruined by the environment. No real person could reasonably assume that all of the things done were to create a Utopia. Some, I can see as the twisted ideas of a well intentioned extremist, but the rest doesn’t make sense at all. To me it seems like they were trying to shelter the characters for no good reason. I may be wrong about the definition of Utopia, but I don’t think it means a world that’s so middling that it’s almost horrifying.
I don’t think Lois Lowry meant to write about a utopia in the Giver. Things such as the mandatory euthanization of the old and weak babies make it pretty clear.
I guess I missed the point. I thought it was supposed to be a fictional utopia written to make it obvious that something was wrong. The reader and protagonist could see what was wrong, but no one else could.
Maybe Trick Rider meant that the people in the Giver thought they had made a Utopia when in fact they hadn’t? From the way the characters talk, things are way better than in the old days. I guess he’s wondering why anyone would think this was a good world. Maybe because they didn’t know any better? Jonas for example didn’t know what was meant by “released” until he saw the baby being euthanized.
There was one thing I didn’t understand, though. If Jonas knew that being released meant going away, didn’t that mean that that was his only concept of death? Like when he sees his father injecting the baby that goes limp, how does he know that that’s death and that death is different from what he had been told?
I haven’t read it since 3rd grade or thereabouts (age 8-9). I picked it out for our ‘silent reading’ period. I remember being absorbed by it, and also very disturbed. I was a sensitive child! Reading about the ‘controversies’ that apparently exist about it, I can recall feeling very strongly a disgust and abhorrence of the world depicted and an unease about how ‘unfair’ it was. It affected me for a long time.
The story ‘It’s A Good Life’ which I just recently read (upon its being mentioned in a thread here) left me feeling a somewhat similar way. The stories which leave these kind of impressions on me are ones where I feel like the characters are trapped in a hopeless, horrible situation not of their own making. I don’t enjoy reading such stories, and as a child I think I wanted some assurance that the ‘real world’ isn’t like that.
I don’t recall ever thinking that Jonah died at the end, but at the age I read it I’m not sure I knew about hypothermia (it wasn’t until I read 'A Call of the Wild, about a year later, I think, that I learned about that!).
Actually Freudian Slit, that was exactly was I meant. Thanks for clearing that up.
You make a good point, too. I’d never thought of that little bit of Fridge Logic.
No prob.
I’m trying to remember exactly what he said, or if he did have a concept of death at all. Maybe he’d seen dead animals or something? The whole world just seemed so sanitized, it seemed bizarre that he’d see his father inject the baby with a syringe and think, “My dad’s a murderer” and not, “What’s going to happen now?” or just be totally confused.
I suppose, though, that no one in the world knew any better, save for the Giver. The fact that everyone progresses at the same time (at x age, you learn to ride a bike, etc.), is told what job to do, etc. just makes them seem super compliant, and it doesn’t even seem like a bad thing initially. But after a while, it’s really scary. And bland.
Fridge Logic?
Have you not had your life ruined by TV Tropes yet? Here’s a link to the relevant page:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic
Even if they knew of the old days some people might think it was still better. For instance the society in the The Giver doesn’t seem to have war, violent crime, starvation, poverty, and horrid illnesses (although standard ones like the cold still exist) and especially since most people don’t know about the Release they won’t think death exists anymore.
Well he realized that the baby going limp is unmistakeably similar to a memory he received from the Giver where a soldier is dying. Speaking of things I didn’t understand about the book how do people commit Release knowing that when they get old they’ll be released too?
Ooh, my life is definitely ruined now! Thanks for the link.
There are definitely huge plot holes in the storyworld of The Giver. It does seem a valid criticism to me that the world is constructed in such a way because It Had to Be this way for The Author’s Point to work.
Arbitrary ‘rules’ that don’t make sense really rankle me, and I think that’s part of what I was reacting to as a child. Why would anyone construct a world like this? Especially people who are not supposedly Cackling Villains.
True. And no real concept of pain–as soon as anything bad happens, you pop a painkiller and you’re fine.
It also seems to be a world with no sex since as soon as you get stirrings/wet dreams, you start taking pills. I wonder how the birth mothers are impregnated–artificially, I’d assume.
I’d forgotten that part. Maybe they just think it’s all for the best? Or maybe there’s some serious denial or mental gymnastics going on…“It’s not really death!” or something?
ETA:
The only thing that makes sense is that people started with a good idea and just took it too far. Like…war sucks, poverty sucks, famine sucks, pain is bad. It seems like the people in this society just started thinking anything remotely hurtful is bad–why not prevent it if we can? And then you get into emotional pain. Well, how do you prevent that? Assigned mates, assigned kids, no sex drives, everyone at a level of contentment. (The opposite of Brave New World in that regard.)
I don’t know how they decided that euthanasia of twins and babies that aren’t “team players” and oldies was a good idea. Okay, I suppose if we had too many elderly people that would be bad because of overpopulation since people obviously can live for a while (no disease). The twin thing seems like a primitive superstition. And I suppose it’s a society that values conformity so babies that cry in the night and get attached to families that they aren’t assigned to are just a bad idea.
I enjoyed it, but I was disappointed in several spots by faulty world-building. One example: one child is hungry just before dinner, and complains that he is “starving” - the teachers criticize him sharply for using that word: no one in their society starves, and it’s wrong to exaggerate. So why teach the children the word “starve” in the first place? I seem to recall a few other places where the characters seem to know about things that elsewhere we are told they could have no way of knowing.