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The Giver
Analysis
Historical Significgance
• Sir Thomas More wrote his 1516 book Of the
Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island
Utopia, the term "utopia" has been used to
describe apparently perfect societies that
have attained an ideal social and political
structure that protects the people from the
worst ills of humankind.
• Moore's book featured many aspects of
communalism, such as a lack of private
ownership, an equitable distribution of work, and
an emphasis on order over chaos.
(A form of Socialism?)
a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates
that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should
be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Dystopian
• Novels like the Giver often emphasize socialist
values as a key aspect of their societies while
showing the thin line between an orderly
society and a repressive, dystopian one.
• (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively,
cacotopia, kakotopia, cackotopia, or antiutopia) is a community or society that is in
some important way undesirable or
frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia.
often characterized by
dehumanization,[2] totalitarian governments, envi
ronmental disaster,[3] or other characteristics
associated with a cataclysmic decline in society.
Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of
fiction and are often used to draw attention to
real-world issues regarding
society, environment, politics, economics, religion
, psychology, ethics, science, and/ortechnology,
which if unaddressed could potentially lead to
such a dystopia-like condition.
Other important works
•
•
•
•
•
1984
RUR
A Clockwork Orange
Fareinheight 451
The Hunger Games
To name a few…
Roles in society
• Historically, many communities that were
founded as experiments in utopia tried to honor
socialist values such as egalitarianism and the
common good, both of which are reflected in the
beginning chapters of The Giver. Jonas's society
has no class divisions; even though Jonas's
mother refers to the position of Birthmother as
lacking honor, all citizens are born from these
Birthmothers whose role is consequently
recognized as an essential, if less desirable
Assignment in society
• the people in Jonas's society do not seem to
have any concept of greed because they lack a
currency and are all distributed food and
other items according to their needs. Jonas is
taught from a young age to share and treat
others equally, and his society seems at first to
be close to utopian.
• Many novels that portray dystopian societies
such as George Orwell's Animal Farm and
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World join The
Giver in showing how fine the line often is
between the ideal and the repressive.
• Brave New World depicts a highly ordered society
that has achieved world peace and stability, but
they have to resort to machinations such as drug
use to reduce the desire of the society's citizens
to revolt and otherwise ruin their artificial utopia.
Similarly, the "fairy story" of Animal Farm begins
as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and
subsequent Bolshevik Revolution in Imperial
Russia in 1917, as the idealist farm animals seek
to throw off the imperialist rule of their human
farmer. However, they quickly find that although
they enumerate such values as the equality of all
animals, the leaders of the revolution become
corrupted in their success and resort to harsh
measures to repress the other farm animals.