The Importance Of Memory In The Giver By Lois Lowry

I have read the novel, “The Giver”, written by the famous American writer Lois Lowry. This book was written under author’s impression after visiting her aging father in the hospital, who had lost his long term memory. The idea of the book is the importance of memory. The novel is set in a society which seems like utopian, in this society there is no hunger, sadness, or misery. However this utopian society is held from experiencing true emotions. This lack of emotion is causing serious problems for the main character Jonas, when he was elected to be the new guardian of memory. It was his job to make sure no one found out about the past. Since the community is build perfect, and they will not feel any kind of emotion even if it’s a good feeling like love.

From the beginning of The Giver we met perfect people, in the ideal community with strict rules. Everyone is happy here. And the community leads its own way of life. Everything here is the same. One of the ideas for the book is sameness, so that the people will fit in with others, and this is repeated though out the whole novel. For support of this idea is the mother’s and Lily’s discussing the new child Gabriel by name. Father got permission to bring Gabriel to his house for extra nurturing. Lily was trying to look “innocent” suggested to keep him. But the rules said that there were supposed to be only 2 children one male and one female for each family unit. It was written very clearly in the rules. And we can say that