Critical report
(Create memories of your own)
Would you be willing to accept the price of having no memory in exchange of security and a life in peace? Well, it seems that in some past the community in The Giver decided to eliminate all pain from their lives. Without memory, there is no pain, if you cannot remember physical pain, you might as well not have experienced it at all, and you cannot be overwhelmed by unhappiness or shame if you cannot even remember the incidents that hurt you.
To do so, the community had to give up the memories of their societys collective experiences. In this report we will see what it means to have so fooled an entire community in thinking that they know what real pleasures are when they dont even have memories or have never experienced pain and suffer. But as Jonas undertakes his training, he discovers that just as there is no pain without memory, there is also no true happiness.
Where the 12-year-old boy named Jonas lives, is a perfect, utopian community, where there are no choices. All the families of the community are chosen by the Elders, each family is strictly made up of a mother, father, and two children, one of each sex, although, no child is biologically related to their parents. Every aspect of a persons life is carefully planned. There is no snow or sunshine, no colors or music, no animals and no nature.
Regardless the sameness present in that society, there is still happiness. The community lives in a complete peaceful environment, where there is no crime, no disease, no pain, no rudeness and no unemployment. People in the community take special care to avoid doing or saying anything different.
Every person in Jonass community is assigned a role, or job when they turn 12, one which he or she is suited for emotionally, physically and mentally. When Jonas and other Elevens become Twelves, Jonas is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory. As the Receiver of Memory, he will be the person in the community that will have access to all the memories of the past of a society that lives only in the present.
Jonas must keep the memories within himself, until he can train a new Receiver to whom he can pass them to. The Receiver therefore has knowledge of things that no one in the community has access to, but he also has the responsibility to carry the burden of sorrow and pain that the memories bring. Later on we discover what Jonas chooses, the world he has always known filled with sameness, or one that is filled with emotions, including the joys and pains of life.
Giving up memories of the societies collective experiences will not only allow the community to forget all of the pain that had been suffered in the past, throughout human history, but this also prevented members of the society to take on dangerous activities that could cause suffering and conflicts. Although, according to the novel, memory is still essential. This is why the Elders have designated a Receiver to remember history for them; they think that if you do not remember your errors you might repeat them.
In my opinion, a whole community cannot be so fooled in thinking that everything is just how it is, that there is nothing beyond that or reasons for the way things are. The people should know the truth, the way they live is not life it is a state where they dont even have the option to feel. Instead, as the Giver comes to realize, he thinks that the society should have the option to freely choose to give up their humanity in order to create a more stable and controllable society. Just as Jonas learns how costly it is to have an orderly, peaceful society and decides that he cannot pay that price.
A clear example of what a society can become when they dont have memories is when the Giver shows Jonas a video about release. He watched how his father injected a needle in the forehead of the crying newborn, until the child became completely still. Jonas had seen the childs expression before, it was familiar for him. It is then, with help of the memories that the Giver had given to him, about the young, bloodied soldier dying before his eyes that Jonas realizes what his father has just done.
As Jonas says in the book in chapter 19, page 150; He killed it! My father killed it!. If his father would have had or been given the same memories that he had received, his father would have been conscious of what he was doing; killing a baby. The problem with lacking memory is that you dont know whats reality, to such a point, where the society in the Giver see what they call release, as something normal in their lives when in real life that is assassination. They do not appreciate the true wonder of life; death is not tragic to them because life is not precious.
The members of Jonass community are not able to appreciate the joys of life because they have never experienced and felt pain or grief; they have a completely monotonous way of living that is free from any emotional variation. When he receives memories from the Giver, the memories of pain make him appreciate the idea of love and comfort as much as the memories of pleasure do.
With help from the memories the Giver passed onto Jonas, he realizes what he was missing out of life. Even thought the community intended to give a peaceful and perfect environment, there was actually no true happiness in it. This is why Jonas prefers to leave the community with the new child Gabriel risking both of their lives but to live to the fullest, experiencing real life, and real feelings. He uses for example memories of exhaustion to help Gabriel sleep, or memories of sunshine in order to warm up both of them from the cold. As the father he goes from the community, he feels his memories becoming more nebulous. He was ready to give up, but as he reached the top of the hill, Jonas remembered the place that had warmth and light although, it was different from the other memories he had struggled to hold onto. With knowledge but especially hope and courage, Jonas had created a memory of his own, that he would be able to keep. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and that they were waiting too, for the baby. For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. chapter 23, page 178-179.
I think the significance of memory to human life plays an important role, not only in this book, but also in our lives. People have to simply accept the fact that without memory its like if you were living in a blank world where you are unable to differentiate between whats good or bad, whats pain or pleasure because you cannot remember if youve experienced any of these feelings. Without experiencing pain, you cannot know what real happiness is. No matter how delightful an experience can be, you will never value the pleasure it gives you unless you have a memory of a time you have suffered.
Life is based on living to your fullest. Feel all you can feel, eat all you can eat, smell all you can smell, hear all you can hear, touch all you can touch, see all you can see and love all you can love. All the people should have the liberty to choose the way they want to live their lives, that doesnt mean it will all be happiness, but it means you will have the option to learn from your mistakes and experience rough times that will make you appreciate so much the pleasures in your life. Finally, life is based on, creating your own path by creating your own memories that you will keep forever long.
Bibliographical references
* The novel The Giver written by Lois Lowry
* The web pages: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/giver/context.html
http://www.bookrags.com
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