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The Giver, By Lois Lowry

705 Words3 Pages

In some regions, death is a word people wail and mourn over, while in others speaking about it is a taboo. This is taken to the extreme in the dystopian book, The Giver, by Lois Lowry. The community in the book sees death in an altered way compared to how the real world does, seeing it for it’s practical uses instead of having emotional ties like the physical reality, which sparks debates on where the line is in terms of the idea of death and whether using death as a tool is ethical.
When someone in the real world dies, the people who knew that person mourn them. When someone in the book dies or is released, it is not the case. When Caleb fell into the river and drowned, the community performed the “Ceremony of Loss”, where they said his …show more content…

Their values are more focused on sustaining a functional community compared to our lives where everyone has their own calling. People in the community choose jobs for other people and if that job doesn’t work for them, they are released instead of changing their jobs, like people would do in real life. It shows how the community uses the ultimate punishment as a way to keep people from doing the wrong thing and from making mistakes. It seems highly unethical and makes the reader wonder about the morals of the community and how they differ from real life. They don’t think much about death while it is very emotional for people in the real world. In the real world, we have emotions tied to death like sadness, guilt, and sorrow, while in the community in the book, they don 't have any emotions because they keep people from having full control over themselves.
The Giver written by Lois Lowry raises many questions about morals and life and how emotions can block our minds from logical thinking, but can also limit people if emotions are removed. When their views on death are contrasted from the real world and how society views death, people will realize that the way they see death in a very strange way where people can be more effective if they have no connection to other people. When issues like these are brought into the minds of the reader, they start to ask, “Why do we see the idea of death differently than those in the

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