Museum of Resistance and Resilience

The Giver

The Giver is a novel written by Lois Lowry in 1993. The story follows a young boy named Jonas who lives in a seemingly utopian society where the community lacks pain, color, memory, climate, and terrain. Jonas is selected to inherit the role of The Giver, who’s job is to store all past memories and aid the community’s decision making by using knowledge from the past. After experiencing feelings of love, happiness and pain, Jonas realizes that the people in his current world have given up their freedom to feel and think as individuals in order to maintain a world without disorder. He becomes dissatisfied with his society and vows to escape the community in order to restore the feelings and emotions of the citizens. The Giver is a prime example of a dystopian utopia. A utopian society is only utopian if everyone agrees on the same thing; once someone challenges the rules of the society, the system becomes broken and a revolution may occur.

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