Literary Analysis of the Novel "The Giver" by Lois Laurie

The novel "The Giver" is about a boy by name Jonas who turns 12 and lives in a utopian society as it seems to be. The society has rules that every single person in the society has to follow, otherwise, the individuals get “released”. Individuals in a society have no emotions. and they are not able to see colors. When children turn 12 they are assigned different assignments. Jonas was the only one who was selected by the Elders to be the Receiver of the Memory.

The Giver and the Receiver planned so the Receiver can smuggle outside the society. Jonas or the Receiver is the protagonist in the novel. As a consequence of sameness, Jonas does not differ or adverse from others in his society, he is almost identical and comparable with individuals in his society except that others in the community have dark eyes, but Jonas has pale eyes. Else there is not a lot of descriptions in the story of how Jonas looks like. Jonas inclined to act on emotions such as at the end of the novel he began to let his sense and instinct take over his decisions and actions when he wanted to escape outside the society, he decided to take the baby Gabriel with him when he knew that Gabriel is going to be released, “dead”. The Receiver is ambitious and has goals and ambitions to show his community that the Elders are oppressing and enslaving them, whereas the Elders controlling, measuring, organizing and regulate everything in the society, this indicates that the Elders are inhumane.

Jonas is a dynamic character, although he completely changed, he was apprehensive about his upcoming assignment but are he received his assignment he started to have emotions and he began to feel pain and adversity as he also felt satisfying and enjoyable feelings. Throughout the novel we get to know that he has two friends, Asher and Fiona, Jonas has a young sister, named Lilly and they have a mother and a father. At the beginning of the novel, Jonas liked Fiona as a friend but throughout he had stronger emotions and feelings for her. The relationship between Jonas and Fiona changed are Jonas stopped taking strings pills ever since the Giver showed Jonas what is love and let him feel it. But the relationship from Fiona's side was not so effective, because she was taking the strings pills.

In the story, Jonas faces many conflicts such as internal and external conflicts, but the internal conflicts had the biggest roles in the story as they were one of the reasons behind the external conflicts. The internal conflict of the novel is man vs. self, for instance, one of the internal conflicts is Jonas dealing with his emotions, feelings, and thoughts, for example, Jonas attempted to see if his family know what love is, ' Jonas hesitantly asks his parents if they love him ', his parents bewildered and were flustered and they rebuked him to pay anon to 'precision of language. ' Another example of an internal conflict is the difficulties that Jonas faced in understanding what release is, one me, Jonas clarified for the Giver how inquisitive he is about knowing what release is, the Giver answered Jonas that “as Receiver, he is allowed to have access to any information he wants“, later on Jonas knows that release means death.

The external conflict in the novel is man vs. society/community, for instance, Jonas wanted to smuggle from his community and revolt against the laws of the society have he figured out the secret dictatorship, iniquity, and the wickedness of the community. The emotions of the human and humanity are the main theme of the Giver, Without humanity and sense, people can become savage. Society demands that individuals in the society give up and be devoid of their emotions in order to be controlled and brainwashed and to be able to adhere at following the rules, whereas if the people in society have pity and mercy then they will go out of laws sometimes when someone of their family faces a problem they will see through it, unlike when a child got lost and drown in the river, the committee did a ceremony for replacing him with a newborn child.

The message that the Novel wants to deliver is that the only thing that matters is the emotions and feelings that one can not describe or characterize with words and people should believe in that no one and nothing ever can eliminate the feelings that are essential for our segment, otherwise, we will no longer be humans and being human require and demand humans to have emotions, because emotions are the reason we of our existence and life.