Connor McBride’s Compare & Contrast Essay
Connor McBride
Staci Nazareth
English, Grade 7
17/3/2023 (Mar 17, 2023)
“Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo,” (Lowry 225)
This quote shows how The Giver book by Lois Lowry is more powerful than the movie counterpart. The book is about a life and a community without love, diversity, and memories. It is about sameness, where life is bland and there is no true emotion. It tells the sadness of this concept and how Jonas has to live with it, and how he plans to change it. But in the movie, it is merely Jonas’s short and backgroundless adventure to bring the memories back, the actionized version
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For instance, in the book, Jonas slowly gains the ability to see color as he sees more and more memories with color, like it was a skill that he had to drag up from the bottom of his being with lots of time and practice. “Days went by, and weeks. Jonas learned, through the memories, the names of colors; and now he began to see them all, in his ordinary life (though he knew it was ordinary no longer, and would never be again). But they didn't last. There would be a glimpse of green — the landscaped lawn around the Central Plaza; a bush on the riverbank. The bright orange of pumpkins being trucked in from the agricultural fields beyond the community boundary — seen in an instant, the flash of brilliant color, but gone again, returning to their flat and hueless shade. The Giver told him that it would be a very long time before he had the colors to keep.” (Lowry 122) However, in the movie, he can instantly see color after one memory - as soon as he saw the sled the rest of the movie is in color. This makes the written story better because it helps us better understand the way the colors were taken away - gradually and slowly, and if you can get them back right away just by seeing one memory, than that doesn’t really bring out the importance of the colors having to be