The Community In The Giver

Why is it always assumed that the community in The Giver is imaginary? A form of it exists in real life. Jonas, a seemingly ordinary boy living with his parents and sister, finds out that the community where he lives is not at all what it looks like, leading him to take an extraordinary journey.

Due to the existence of all-controlling governments, the real world is not completely removed from the dystopian worlds of The Giver and Nineteen Eighty-Four. People living under a Marxist-Leninist government’s rule may love and trust their (single) Party to a strange extent.

Citizens of The Giver’s community don’t have true feelings - parents and siblings are unrelated to them, chosen by a government-like body called the Elders. When children
experience their first ‘Stirrings’ (feelings of love), usually through the ritual dream-telling, they are told to take medicine to suppress them. Jonas’ mother tells him to take the ‘pills’, which is the ‘treatment for stirrings’. Notice the use of the word ‘treatment’, as if Stirrings are unwanted and have to be purged, instead of natural human emotion. This is what she and everyone in the Community has been taught. This may make them more open to the fact that their spouses are chosen for them, and express no love or deep emotion to one another.

In real life, doing this will have disastrous consequences, as each have their own lovers and will be unwilling to have ‘life choices’ chosen for them by an external body.
There are many stories, most famously Romeo and Juliet, about denied or forbidden love, which almost always ends negatively (in Romeo and Juliet, death for both). In totalitarian countries like China, though marriages are not ‘chosen’, people wishing to get married will have to consult the Party. One specification is that men have to be over 22 and women over
20.

In The Giver, however, these two variables are removed. Residents don’t know or understand ‘love’, a word used so infrequently it’s almost obsolete.

Citizens are also told to trust the Elders (a form of Government) to make all life choices, like spouses and jobs. The main character, Jonas, was ‘certain’ that his assigned job would be ‘the right one’. After Jonas, as Receiver of Memory, finds out that people were once allowed to choose things for themselves. Being brought up in a community where the Elders control all aspects of life, ponders why he is not allowed to make choices himself, and concludes that it is because people will choose wrongly. In the real world, one of the most important human rights is for people to be free to make their own choices.

However, people can influence this choice, including family and close friends.
In The Giver, all choices are controlled by a ‘higher power’, so that relationships dependent on this influence is weakened. Now, jobs are mainly decided by which subjects a student takes; if a student takes Physics for his M.D then he will likely become a Physicist.

The Giver’s community does not mention subjects - jobs are often ‘chosen’ based on where the child likes to volunteer. Note that this is not true volunteer work - children are forced to do it, threatened by the possibility of not receiving an assignment.

In The Giver, this level of control over the commoners may also be considered a breach of human rights.

But that’s not all there is to it. People’s thoughts are monitored, through dream-telling and telling of emotion, and even hidden cameras and speakers.

Near the start of the book, Jonas’ father asks at dinnertime: “Who wants to be the first tonight, for feelings?” (15)

Because it’s not as secretive and dark as the Thought Police in Nineteen Eighty-Four, children enjoy these sessions, sometimes even plead to go first, because to them it is just a ‘ritual’, a part of daily life. Citizens are brought up to be very honest, because of the cameras that observe everything. Offenders will be warned through the speakers, possibly causing
embarrassment.