Family System In The Giver

Lois Lowry’s the Giver was published in 1993. It tells a story of the life of Jones who lives in a highly controlled community in the future. Considered as “dystopian literature”, the plot includes assigning children, release, social engineering and genetic engineering. Jones’ society sometimes reflects old China, which has some comparability. Both have extensive government control and less freedom to choose individually. This essay will compare and contrast both the similarities and differences between traditional China and the community in the Giver, while analyzing below are base on the government control, and then come to a conclusion.

The first similarity is the quantity of children in each family unit. In Lois Lowry’s the Giver, children are given births by the selected birth mothers; later, when they come to be a-year-old, they are going to be assigned to an unfamiliar family as children. Each family can have a maximum of one boy and one girl who are in

Considering the family structure, both of them are unique. In China, no matter in the past or in the 21st century, each family member has an enormous relation network with everyone in the big family. The big-family is one of the typical Chinese cultures which means a family with parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles. Although all the members may not live together, when the harvest season come and during the Spring Festival, they must go back home from cities for celebrating the New Year with elderly parents and siblings, as a permanent historical convention (Peng 2003). However, in the Giver, there is no such thing like grandparents that all the elder people live in the House of the Old. They even do not have their biological parents and could never know them. The kinship is acute absent in the community. Therefore, all the citizens in Jonas’ community cannot feel the emotion called