memory is essential
if you do not remember your errors, you may repeat them
just as there is no pain without memory, there is also no true happiness.
No matter how delightful an experience is, you cannot value the pleasure it gives you unless you have some memory of a time when you have suffered.
twelve-year-old Jonas rejects a society where everyone is the same to follow his own path.
Moments involving physical nakedness are closely related to the idea of emotional nakedness
trust, intimacy, freedom. innocence and childishness
an escape from the physical and psychological hold of the community
We really have to protect people from wrong choices.
benevolent oppression
peace & order VS individual choices
rebellion
The phrase “back and back and back” is meant to express the inevitability of the current situation: Sameness is not a historical moment that has a beginning and an end, but an endless, changeless state, something beyond time and space and human intervention.
This quality of “back and back and back” is a major factor in the society’s success. No one thinks to question structures that are so ancient and unchanging that they seem perfectly natural, and even though Jonas and the Giver know that life existed before Sameness, they have no memories of Sameness ever being defeated.
Since the words “back and back and back” constitute an acceptance of the community’s most important illusion—that nothing has ever existed but Sameness—this moment could be seen as a moment of defeat, in which Jonas feels utterly crushed by the strict structures of the society.
diversity, differences, choices, orderly, predictable, painless, injustice, cruelty
without the memory it’s all meaningless
burden and pain
individual, special, unique, proud
He saw all of the light and colour and history it contained and carried in its slow-moving water; and he knew that there was an Esewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going.
The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.
I don’t understand the ending. I think Jonas and Gab died. Dan, we shall discuss the story some time.
To add on:
one choice always eliminates another choice
People with free choice have to accept the consequences of their actions, but in the end they will be happier to have the choice.
His memories exist simply to give his life meaning and pleasure, and to help him overcome personal obstacles. Love and choice both require memory, and Jonas loves, makes choices, and remembers.
If Jonas does die at the end, he still dies only after having really lived. Note how at the end of the novel, Gabriel is referred to as a baby, not a newchild. Jonas and Gabriel are now both more human.
At eleven years old I am not a particularly adventurous child, nor am I a rebellious one. But I have always been curious.
I wander through Shibuya day after day during those years when I am 11, 12 and 13. I love the feel of it, the vigor and the garish brightness and the noise; all of such a contrast to my own life.
And I remember once again how comfortable, familiar and safe my parents had sought to make my childhood by shielding me from ELSEWHERE. But I remember, too, that my response had been to open the gate again and again. My instinct had been a child’s attempt to see for myself what lay beyond the wall.
And if I’ve learned anything through that river of memories, it is that we can’t live in a walled world, in an “only us, only now” world where we are all the same and feel safe. We would have to sacrifice too much. The richness of color and diversity would disappear feelings for other humans would no longer be necessary. Choices would be obsolete.
i like the idea that children are parents’ receiver of memories. They continue their parents’ lives. They are the future.
Carl Nelson
The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge,history, meories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.
It is very risky.
But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom.
Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.
Words taken from SparkNotes & the writer’s Newbery Medal receiving speech…
