The Giver Essay

            The author, Lois Lowry, develops many interesting thoughts and issues for the responder to consider which do lead to a broadened understanding of the self and world.
             The concept of euthanasia and suicide are an interesting concept of this book. An important part of building a utopia, in this book is that the elderly need to be "put down" as though they were merely a family pet, this is accepted because it is believed it releases a person into a different "community", although wacky as it may seem, it is not all that different from beliefs in heaven and hell. I personally think that this is immoral and outright age discrimination, although I feel it is better to assist in a painless suicide rather than a self-inflicted and painful death. .
             In the book, the importance of a family unit is highly emphasized, attempting to show the importance of a caring family. This has some rather adverse affects in the novel including: the requirement to apply for a spouse, the government feel that spouses should be carefully matched the Government does this. The Government perform a similar procedure to have a child, each family is matched with a child of a carefully selected "birth-mother", and each family is restricted to a maximum of one male child and one female. I personally see logic in this although this crushes human's desire to decide and have unplanned emotion.
             In the novel "The Giver", they live in a society regimented by a Government, which knows no other and henceforth does not attempt to change. The majority of people in "the community" as they have never known any difference, although when Jonas is given memories of how human society used to exist, he tried to bring about a change and turn people away from this regimented existence. He does this by running away, as he gets further away from his "community" his memories begin to fade to all those left in "the community". I believe that his decision was both logical and completely, selfless, this is mostly due to the fact he did this only for the benefit of the community to try and bring them out of the hypnotic-like-state.