The Giver by Lois Lowry is a famous novel that is set in a dystopian world about a boy named Jonas and a world where everything goes along perfectly and if you make a mistake you are punished. Jonas must help his society learn to embrace choice, individualism and unique identity. In his supposed utopian world everything is controlled and the citizens have no choice and no way to go wrong. It is best that way…or is it?

 Lois Lowry’s inspiration for The Giver was The Gulf War after seeing the destruction while visiting her son who was in the air force at the time. The experience caused her to think about why people engage in wars and cause so much damage to one another. Which is what helped shape The Giver.

Jonas is getting ready for his ceremony of twelve where all twelve year olds are assigned jobs until they are released (death by lethal injection). Jonas is given the job: receiver of memory where he must hold all the past memories of human experience including joy, pain and emotion. Jonas’s mentor in the receiver of memory job is a mysterious man who tells Jonas to call him “The Giver” (hence the title).

The memory of pain and emotion has been eliminated to everybody but one person: Jonas’s mentor who transfers most of those memories of suffering and emotion to Jonas. Together they plan to run away, forcing society to deal with these memories because not all of them are bad: Sun, Snow, color, music, love and so many others were erased because in some way they were ‘not helpful’ to society.

In conclusion; the message of The Giver is that life is full of pain and you can’t have a good life and experience goodness without pain because joy and pleasure are meaningless without an even balance of suffering. A pain-free life is an unfinished life. Memories, both amazing and horrible, are very important for learning and shaping human identity. Without memories how are we supposed to learn from our past mistakes?!