In The Giver by Lois Lowry, Jonas concludes that a life without feelings, colour, or love is not worth living. Life can be convenient and comfortable but it is feelings and memories, both good and bad, joyful and painful, that define the experience of Life and true humanity.
Jonas lives in a community that is highly structured and is governed by a strict set of rules for the purpose of keeping his community safe and comfortable. Like the furniture, everything in the community is “practical, sturdy” and “the function for each piece [is] clearly defined” (74). Everything and everyone in the community has a distinct and practical role and purpose in the community in order to make society sturdy and stable and function like a well-oiled clock. Things like seasons, hills, and weather fail to measure up to the community’s ideal picture of safety, comfort and convenience. The Giver explains that “snow [makes] growing food difficult,” “unpredictable weather [makes] transportation almost impossible at times,” and hills “[make] conveyance of goods unwieldly” (83-84). If something in the world makes life difficult and impractical, it is eliminated for the sake of “Sameness” (84). Diversity and choice has no role in the community because people “might make wrong choices” and endanger the well-being and functionality of the community (98). The community is governed by the idea that people are protected by not being able to make decisions for themselves; this Sameness is what gives the community its stability (99).
After Jonas is given memories from the past from the Giver, Jonas realizes that this choice to move to Sameness sacrifices the essence of what it means to be human. The community may be safe, practical and functional, but it loses colour, art, music, and true emotions as a result. Instead of enjoying the beautiful vibrancy of colour, the community sees everything as the “same nondescript shade” (24). In the community, furniture is only meant to serve a purpose but in the Giver’s room Jonas witnesses art as the Giver’s furniture is “more luxurious” and “the table legs” are “slender and curved, with a small carved decoration at the foot” (74). Music only exists in the memories and Jonas comes to realize that he and the Giver “are the only ones who have feelings” (154, 57). Without memories, Jonas’s community is incapable of experiencing the emotion of love (127). The Giver explains to Jonas that the community really “know[s] nothing” and that “without the memories,” life is “meaningless” (105). The community’s choice to bring about Sameness keeps the community functioning and stable, but ultimately destroys the beauty in life and the community’s humanity.
After Jonas escapes from the community with Gabriel, he realizes that the community is successful in providing a safe, painless and risk-free place to live, but at the same time creates a community of inhumane and unfeeling people. He recognizes that the community generates a safe, “orderly, disciplined life…where nothing was ever unexpected[,]…inconvenient[, or] unusual” (165). However, Jonas comes to the point where he knows that “he [can’t] go back to the world of no feelings that he had lived in so long,” even though he would be safer there (131). Jonas realizes that he would have been well fed and cared for in the community but if “he had stayed, he would have…lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love” (173). Jonas decides that a life without those things is not worth living. Life is pain, death, hurt, anger, love, joy, and beauty all wrapped up in the state of human existence. Despite the inconveniences, the pain, and the hardship that come with being human is worth the sacrifice in order to truly feel and be.
Lowry, Lois. The Giver. Dell Laurel-Leaf, 1993.
Image from The Giver movie, 2014. I do not own this image.