The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Giver is a very common science fiction short novel written by Lois Lowry. For proficient leaders, it may be quite unintimidating due to its length. However, Lois Lowry’s book is easy to read to read as it has simple vocabulary but the themes are thought-provoking and vigorous. The writer creatively uses cumbersome and contentious topics like euthanasia, liberty of choice and individual values. The moral lessons of “The Giver” in one way or the other compares to science fiction ideas in “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas by Ursula LeGuin, Deborah Anapol’s “The Future of The Family and the Fate of Our Children” and Steven Pinker’s “The Moral Instinct.” Therefore, the class creative texts discuss utopian and dystopian societies and their perfections and imperfections; thus they are evidently similar and different from the main Sci-Fi text in various ways.
There are different ways of telling whether a text is science fiction or not. To start with, science fiction stories, unlike other works of literature, often communicate about the science and technology and the future. Also, these texts in most cases involve the use of partially true and partially fictitious laws and theories (Pringle, 60). The plots in the main sci-fi book and the class creative texts include the creation of circumstances that are dissimilar from those of the present day and the illustrious past. They include human elements explaining the effects of new discoveries, accomplishments and scientific advances in the future.

While “The Giver” and “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” by Ursula LeGuin are set in dystopian societies that show some perfection, there are hidden imperfections. The citizens of Omelas experience physical pain while Jonas’s community experience emotional pain (Lowry, 100). The society may not be facing war, crime, poverty or any other kind of suffering but memories of certain emotions like love, joy, compassion, and hate have been eliminated. They seem to be striving to maintain what they call sameness and that, according to Jonas, causes emotional suffering. LeGuin criticizes the elegant intellectuals’ habit of teaching the society to celebrate agony over pleasure, violence over peace, and misery over happiness. He sympathizes with the people of Omelas because despite naming the child’s predicament as the reason behind the compassion in the society, they are well aware that they too, just like the child, are not free (Le, 03). They live on a lie that one human, even though important like any other, has to be dehumanized for the independent benefit of the entire community.
The Giver addresses middle school audience through the use of adult themes of memory, social contract compromises, as well as peoples’ desire for dependable sensation and expression. Many people perceive this book as a modern day utopia, but it is more of a dystopia. Jonas, Lowry’s main character, has a perfect world and everything seems to be under control (Lowry, 05). This society also knows no war or fear of pain. Later, he discovers that his society is built on lies of alleged equality and decent treatment for everybody. Similarly, Deborah Anapol, in “The Future of The Family and the Fate of Our Children,” discusses how the today’s adults were raised in nuclear families (Anapol, 01). She considers this kind of upbringing as imperfect as the father is the breadwinner and the mother is the homemaker. The nuclear family, according to this book, is a delicate organism that was made for the industrial era.
Lowry also disregards the kind of society that does not care about the interests of individuals but the collective benefit of the majority. Obviously, this apocalyptically perfect society, where social and genetic engineering has eliminated conflicts and differences, is fictional. However, through the Ceremony of Twelve, Lowry discusses the importance of the Individual (Lowry, 136). He uses Jonas as a character with unique abilities, whom he calls the receiver, chosen to remember the history of humanity before the earth is wiped clean by this new society. Steven Pinker’s “The Moral Instinct” uses the examples of Mother Teresa, Bill Gates and Norman Borlaug and how they contribution to the community to discuss how a new field is using trickery to unveil the sixth sense, the moral sense (Pinker, 01). The bottom line is that moral goodness gives us the sagacity that we are well-intentioned human beings.
In summary, it is worth noting that the chosen class texts are quite similar in terms of the choice of language and intensity of the themes. The first two novels are dystopian as they discuss societies that are perceived to be perfect but have imperfections. The Giver tends to depict a society guided by sameness. In fact, Lowry describes the kind of perfect in the society that has never existed and can only be possible in the future. However, Jonas is the character who gives us a hint that there is no such thing as sameness in this society. There many hidden imperfections and Jonas is a character with special abilities. The contributions of Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, and Norman Borlaug show elements of perfection in the context of moral instincts. For this reason, Pinker’s article is a perfect example of a Utopia.
Work Cited
Anapol, Deborah. “Love Without Limits – Articles – The Future Of The Family And The Fate Of Our Children”. Lovewithoutlimits.Com, 2015, http://www.lovewithoutlimits.com/articles/The_Future_of_The_Family.html.
Le, Guin U. K. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Mankato, Minn: Creative Education, 1993. Print.
Lowry, Lois. The Giver. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2012. Internet resource.
Pringle, David. Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. , 2014. Internet resource.
Pinker, Steven. “The Moral Instinct”. Nytimes.Com, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html.