Giver Blog Post, One

In class, we have started Literature Circles again! This time we only have two book choices, The Giver, by Louis Lowry, and The White Mountains, by John Christopher. I am reading the Giver along with

Radhika, Norman and Zifan (my group members). For this blog post, we were to choose from these three choices.

1) Would you want your future to

be decided by others? Why or why not?

2) How do you feel about the "standard practices" and "rituals' in the community?

3) Why is interdependence fostered in the community?

I chose the second question; how do you feel about the "standard practices" and "rituals' in the community?

In the book, Giver, by Louis Lowry, there is a community where pretty much everything for the people is decided for them. For example, the job, their spouse, their child, and etc are chosen for them. The community is a totally safe place to live, but a very boring and strict place to live. There are these rituals and standard practices that the people of the community have to practice. So far I have read about sharing their feelings each night at every household and sharing your dreams of the night before, with your family members. "It was one of the rituals, the evening telling of feelings." (Page 5) "Usually, at the morning ritual when the family members told their dreams, Jonas didn't contribute much" (page 34) How do I feel about these rituals? I feel that they are different and sort of weird.

I think these are different because, in our world we don't do anything like this. Well, maybe sometimes we like to share our feelings but not against our own will. In the book, you have to do it. You absolutely have to share your feelings and dreams. It's sort of like a rule. It's also busting someone's personal "bubble". Each morning at breakfast, you have to share your dreams with the other members of the dwelling. Each person gets a turn, and one by one, they retell what they dreamed. Jonas usually does not dream. Sometimes when he dreams he can only grasp fragments of it but he can't put the story together. But still, he has to share exactly what he saw or what he remembers. "He rarely dreamed. Sometimes he awoke with a feeling of fragments afloat in his sleep, but he couldn't seem to grasp them and put them together into something worthy telling at the ritual." (Page 34)

I think these rituals are weird because, it's so different from what I've learned and known. So it feels different for me. For someone in the community it would feel perfectly fine because they don't know any other way of living. Just like us, they've learned that way from the time they were born, so it's just like taking a school bus to school inour world. If they saw this from another prospective, maybe they would have thought this was a bad idea. But at the same time, their way of living is much safer than ours, and more trust worthy. No one lies to you, because it’s a rule there. "He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie. It was an integral part of the learning of precise speech. Once, when he had been a Four, he had said, just prior to day meal at school, "I'm starving" Immediately he had been taken aside for a brief private lesson in language precision." (Page 70)

From the outside all this seems wrong, but the people don't think so. They believe their life is as wonderful as life gets. That's because they don't know any other ways of life. This is because they've never seen anything else but the community life. Even other communities, they are similar to the one Jonas lives in. Even us, someone from outer space or something might think our way of living is wrong. But we haven't seen any other way of living that is better. Now if we had, I'm sure we would have started to live like that, but we aren't. You can't really blame them for living like that. But you could blame the person or the people who started the community (s). And they, they probably thought it was the right thing to do. A safer lifestyle (and it is true), except for... well a lot of things.

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