The Giver Themes

Louis Lowry has many themes in her book, The Giver. But one of her most important themes to me personally is “Self Choice.”
Throughout the whole book, Louis dabbles in this theme with her clever writing.
One place that self choice is evident to me is within the community as a whole. The whole community is standing upon a concrete structure of plan, guidelines, and rules all expected to almost enforce the thought of “this is your regular daily life, no exceptions.”
Another place that self choice is evident to me is when almost a year had past in Jonas’ training. Memories had taken an impact on Jonas and had affected him. Learning about a community with emotion, color, choice, even just freedom had made him wonder about how it would be like if his community has these things. After looking over and thinking deeply about the Receiver’s job and responsibilities of holding and protecting these memories from the community members he relates this to his own experiences through training. He realizes that the pain of memories good or bad needed to be shared. One person within this place cannot withhold memories so descriptive, emotional, and colorful. He wants others to experience

For example, the memory of the elephant. Through this memory it becomes clear that choice sculpts who you are. Those hunters decided it would be ok to slaughter this elephant for its ivory, this of course is frowned upon by the Giver and Jonas. The hunters thought this would be ok, this was their choice, and it sculpts them as a person thinking that this would be okay. When the Giver and Jonas frown upon this it not only sculpts the hunters into who they are it Sculpts Jonas and the giver, because it is their choice and their own trait that this is not okay to them. It is also a part of what the community is because they thought this was not okay and this should be held away from members of the