The Giver: Week of 12/5/13

** Describe the important ideas in this story.
Pages read: Finished

A very important and obvious idea in The Giver is the importance of memories. The book's titles is even based on memories, since the Giver's job is to release the memories to the Receiver and to keep the memories from the past away from the people in the community. Just from that, I think it's easy to tell how important memories are in this story, especially as you read on more. Further on, Jonas' perspective on things changes as he receives the memories of pain and other feelings from the Giver. It was almost like the memories almost made a totally new Jonas since he now wanted to change the way the community worked. He wanted to show them and explain to them the feelings he was feeling, the colors he was seeing, and especially the memories he was experiencing. So, memories are an important part of this book because they're a sort of part of Jonas and the memories he receives really help move the book along with an interesting flow.

An important idea in this book that kind of goes along with the importance of memories are feelings. Jonas gets new feelings like love from the memories he receives from the Giver and they really have an affect on him. Just like the memories themselves, the feelings he received from the memories also cause him to change as a person as the story goes on. When he learns about the feeling of love, he wants to experience the feeling in person with his family unit. When he asks them if they love him and they pretty much give a yes/no answer, he starts to want to make the community a bit more like the memories he was seeing. More full of feelings and color so that everyone could feel the happiness he was experiencing during the memories of love and just happiness.

Another important idea that ties in with the importance of feelings is the idea of perfection that the community has, but doesn't really achieve. The community had everything in sameness, and this was a perfect utopia in their opinion, but they didn't have anything to compare it to. Jonas, once learning of feelings, realizes that what the community has is not perfection since they don't really feel. They feel, and they discuss their feelings at dinner, but they feel very basically, not even feeling the love than Jonas really wanted. And so once Jonas realizes this, a lot of the book is spent showing how the community was trying to grasp perfection with sameness but is far away from it. It's a very important idea because it's an idea throughout a lot of the book. Before Jonas even notices that the community is not perfect, the reader can compare the community to our society and notice that their perfect sameness isn't a world we'd all like.