The Giver by Louis Lowry

"Dystopia- an imagined place where everything is unpleasant; opposite
of Utopia "
- Oxford Dictionary

The book that I am going to talk about, The Giver, revolves heavily on the word above. It made people think, thought and ask what is the meaning of the word society, and if humans should or should not have emotions.

The story takes place in a medium size community where human emotions, and memories were taken away from them and was " stored" inside a man name " the giver." The giver's job is to keep all of the " dangerous" memories, as they so called in the book, away from people, so people can have a peaceful life. Jonas, the main protagonist of this book, is selected to be the successor of the giver. The reason why is selected is that he tends to dream about colors and have feelings, which the people in the community shouldn't have. When Jonas learns all of the horrible memories that he is consistently receiving from the giver, he starts to think about what is the meaning of life and whether this society is " suitable " for living. When he learns from the giver that his father is killing babies with out even feeling painful about it, he starts to collapse and decides to run away from the community. Although the giver warns that if he runs away, all of the memories and feelings he bears will be release back to the community. Ignoring the warning, he runs and takes one person with him, Gabriel, Jonas 's little adopted brother. They ran as far as they can, avoiding search teams.

The ending of this story can depend on the readers' judgment, as the ending ended hastily, and didn't really stated about whether Jonas and Gabriel survived or not. Below is the ending line of the book:

" Behind him, across vast distances of space and time from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too, but perhaps it was only an echo
The Giver, P 180"

The dilemma that the author was trying to make when he wrote the book was to let the reader have an unlimited amount of imaginations, and guesses about the story. Normally, most books usually provide the ending directly, which limited the amount of discussions and the " re redablility" of the book relatively low. However, if you had ever read book like " Crime and Punishment" " The Stranger" " Anna Karenina" and all those " big books", they tend to make the ending a bit " Mysterious" as they gave us lots of rooms to think and wonder about the meaning of life. The Giver, I believe, sort of fits in the middle between the " normal book" and the " big book" due to although it has the quality of not providing the ending directly, but some how, the questions they tried to make us think of was relatively shallow, meaning that it doesn't really make us think of how our modern society is connected in the book.

This book, by far all the book I had read, is relatively easy to interpret, ( the books I enjoy reading talks a lot about morality, and whether we humans should live or not) as the story's plot and ending is very easy to follow and the message the author tried to convey was accurately portrayed. My interpretation of the ending would be that Jonas and Gabriel is alive. Possibly, the ending quote could be which Jonas could be sitting up on a hill or in a cave sitting and watching the society. Most people might think that Jonas died, and the music he heard was from heaven, but it might be Jonas sitting on top of the hill watching the society, since in the society, memories were being sent back, possibly those people were doing something or even making noises, which possibly Jonas mis heard as " music." Since the author decided to leave the ending as " open" its really hard to draw a " solid ending"