Text Response Essay: The Giver

Essay Topic: Jonas tells The Giver “We really have to protect people from wrong choices.” To what extent has the community embraced this idea, and at what cost?

Jonas tells The Giver “We really have to protect people from wrong choices.”(p.128). The Community has embraced this idea by restricting the choices citizens have, such as choosing their families, their assignments and their lives. People are limited in what they can do, see and learn. They don’t have freedom to form their own opinions, make their own decisions and choose their futures for themselves. They do not know the meaning of earning, deserving or being rewarded. They don’t know love, or the warm feeling of family and genuine concern for the people you care about. They are unaware of anywhere further than their Community, and they only have to focus on the future, and what lies ahead, which is already chosen out for them. But most of all, they do not know true pain, hunger or loneliness. It is all controlled, and the citizens don’t even know it. “Once he had yearned for choice. Then, when he had a choice, he made the wrong one.” (p.216)

In The Giver, everyone is assigned to a dwelling, a spouse, and children. They must apply for a house once they have found a spouse, and the Committee must approve of your application. This proves the statement of protecting people from making the wrong choices, because they want everyone to have the right spouse that suits them, considering factors like intelligence, level of energy and interests, which must all correspond perfectly. But "When adults of the community became older...They were no longer needed to create family units." (p.132) They have a time limit for having a family, and a limit for how many children they can apply for. "Two children - one male, one female - to each family unit. It was written very clearly in the rules." (p.20) Though this minimalizes over population, it confines the citizens to a certain number. But this doesn’t matter to the community because they don’t have love or affection for their family, just a genuine liking that isn’t even real. They couldn’t care less about how many children they have as long as they fit in with the Community and follow the rules. The children aren’t even related to the parents so they lack the bond or special connection that defines what family really is all about. “He was in a room filled with people, and it was warm…There were cries of delight. They hugged one another.” (p.157) Imagine not being able to share that atmosphere with the ones you care for, because it’s against the rules. The Elders think taking away raw emotions will make the Community a better place, but raw emotions are what makes us human. And the Community aren’t even aware of it.

Careers are what makes up our everyday lives. They are the reason we attend school and strive to do well and learn new skills that can apply to what we will do in the future. We spend the first chapter of our lives studying until everything leads up to what we’re going to do when we “grow up.” But in The Giver, the children have hardly reached puberty when they are each assigned a job that they must do for the rest of their lives until they are Elders. Their Assignments are “scrupulously thought through by the Committee of Elders.” (p.69) Although this takes away the pressure of finding a job and maintaining it in order to make a living, there is still the empty space of choice that they don’t have.  “What's important is the preparation for adult life, and the training you'll receive in your Assignment.”(p.17) There is always the possibility that they may not like the job that has been assigned to them, but they must do it, without complaining. And since they don’t earn any wages or money from it, there is no motivation that drives them to work harder; it’s just day after day of reward-less work. But if they don’t have the stress of financial management, they don’t have poverty, so maybe it is worth working every day if everything is given to you free of charge. You would think life would be much easier, but it isn’t all about the simplicity; it’s about what you’d prefer, and since the citizens of the community don’t even get a choice in what they will do for the rest of their lives, it isn’t the most perfect way to live either.

These days our education is based on a wide variety of subjects, to teach us everything we need to know, but for the Community, what they are taught is very limited, because of their limited knowledge of the past, and the rest of the world. The decision the Committee of Elders made to deprive everyone from carrying memories of the past was made to protect them from pain and suffering. But before that there was a time when “‘memories once existed before Receivers were created...’” (p.135) Memories make up who we are, what we’ve achieved and experienced. It makes life more interesting if we all had different memories to share; it brings up feelings of nostalgia, tears, laughter and gathers people together as a conversation starter. Sometimes memories can be traumatizing or depressing, so we push them away to the corners of our mind, trying to forget the terrible past and move on with the future; a fresh start from a dark beginning. This is what the Committee are protecting the community from by creating just one person to hold the dark painful past and leave everyone else without a heavy weight on their shoulders to live their lives peacefully. “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.” (p.33) Ignorance is bliss when you are oblivious to the problems of the world. But it hardly seems fair that one person has to be burdened and pained; “‘it would seem a little easier if the memories were shared…’ ‘But then everyone would be burdened and pained.’” (p.46-47) Not only would everyone be burdened with memories, but if the citizens of the Community knew about “all that goes beyond – all that is Elsewhere – and all that goes back” (p.56) they would leave the Community and live differently. And because the Community don’t have the knowledge they need to make their own choices, nothing changes and they stay in the same mindless routine, not knowing any better than they’ve grown accustomed to since birth. On the other hand, memories of the past help determine the future, and without wisdom people would make the same mistakes over and over. And that is why “memories would not be lost with you. Memories are forever.”(p.144) because they teach the future generations the consequences of each action, and the cause and effect, but “They wouldn’t know how to deal with it all.”(p.182)

In conclusion, citizens of the Community are basically instructed through their lives to do this, or do that, and they never learn anything by doing it themselves. “‘We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.’” (p.124).They managed to control poverty and homelessness, in exchange for the absence of choice, love and memories. They live a “life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.” (p.207). There is a great balance of good things in exchange for the bad; however, that depends on what perspective you look at it. It depends on what life you’re used to, what you’ve been taught to believe, and most importantly, on your own personal opinion; something the citizens of the Community don’t even get to have. They may be protected from making the wrong choices, but without choice, there is nothing. Without choice, they are lost in life, waiting for other people to point them in the right direction. But you can’t always rely on someone else to choose what’s best for you, sometimes you just have to take the risk of being wrong and work it out yourself. Otherwise, how will you ever learn?