The Strange Utopia of The Giver
Imagine living in a world where you can’t choose your job, where at the age of twelve you are assigned an occupation by some group of elders. Imagine a world in which you can’t choose that special person to be your wife or husband, a world where nobody is special. Visualize a place where you can’t have your own children, where you have to take care of somebody else’s children. In The Giver by Louis Lowry, this place exists every day. It’s a perfect world, a utopia.
A job is, for many people, one of the most important parts of their life. If it’s so important, you have to enjoy it, and to enjoy it, you have to choose it yourself. In this “utopia,” created in The Giver you don’t get to do that. Other people choose the activity you are going to do for the rest of your life. For example, Fiona was assigned Caretaker of The Old, a job she really wanted, but don’t you think that maybe later in her life, she could change her mind and not want to do her job anymore’she can’t do that because she lives in a world where she doesn’t have a choice, where she can’t run her own life. “You have the power to think what you want.
No matter what the circumstance is.” No one can tell you what to think, you have a mind of your own, and repressing your thoughts won’t do any good at all. I want to give you a quote from the book. ” I heard about a guy who was absolutely sure he was going to be an engineer and instead he was assigned sanitation laborer. He jumped into the river and swam to the closest community, no one saw him again.” This demonstrates that the elders can be wrong.
People defending Sameness can say that all the jobs are made for the people getting them and that they will like them and be an active part of the community. I am going to respond to that with a life story. Before I was twelve, all I wanted to do is be an architect. I always spent my time sketching buildings and structures, and if I would have been assigned a job it would have been that of an architect. Later when I turned 13, I knew I wanted to be a lawyer; I don’t know what made me change my mind, but the point is, this can happen to anyone and it demonstrates that people can be wrong, even the Elders. People change over time.
As people change, their choices change. If this is true, shouldn’t we be free to demonstrate when we change our minds with actions?
Oscar Wilde once said, “A world without love is like a sunless garden where flowers are dead.” Picture a world where you can’t feel anything for anyone, where you can’t love your friends or your parents, where you can’t have a girlfriend because you are assigned a wife. The first human principle is that of choice. In this case the choice of the person who will be next to you for the rest of your life. The premise of the community is that people can be perfectly matched, but as I mentioned before, people can change their minds and likings from one day to another.
They can start to dislike each other. In life, sometimes two people think they are made for each other and get married, but after a few years, sometimes after decades, they get divorced. Why? Because they’ve changed and they don’t longer want to be together. A very good example of incompatibility is my parents. My father is twenty years older than my mother, they grew up in different places, at different times and they don’t like the same things. They have been happily married for 22 years and they haven’t had a single serious problem in those years.
This union wouldn’t have had a chance in Jonas’ community because they simply wouldn’t have been assigned to each other. Love like my parents .
