Entry #7, Research on The Giver

The Giver is a book I read as a kid and teenager, and though both times I got very different themes from it, I loved it all the same.  It taught me (in a nutshell) that differences make the world only better, and that pain and suffering can help us achieve happiness and balance.  I found not many connections with The Giver, and so to start off my research, I looked at Lowry’s background to see it there is any resemblance between her life and Jonas’s world.

While looking at a biography about Lowry, http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/The-Giver-Lois-Lowry-Biography.id-113,pageNum-3.html, it mentioned that since her father was an army officer, she moved around a lot as a kid.  In my opinion, moving around constantly would not only be scary, but also exhausting.  Having to always be the new kid, and never truly knowing where your home is sounds awful.  In a way, Lowry’s strength through it all shows in Jonas, because he isn’t afraid to go out into ‘Elsewhere’, and his tolerance of having to be one of the only people that experiences pain shows more strength.  Another similarity I found between Lowry and Jonas is that when Jonas asked about love, his parents shrugged off the idea, because the community is built so that you only enjoy and deal with your family.  In Lowry’s biography it said ‘her step-grandmother merely tolerated her’, which shows I suppose that she knew a bit about what it was like to not be loved.    

As another form of research into Jonas’s world and Lowry’s life, I looked at Lowry’s Newbery acceptance speech, and it gave me a similar feeling that Lowry’s life did have a lot to do with Jonas’s.  In her speech, http://loislowry.com/pdf/Newbery_Award.pdf, she mentions how so many aspects of the book are based on her own life, from feeling trapped by her parents, to meeting an old, blind man who only remembers color.  It’s interesting how in a way, I was looking for the bad in their world, and the good in ours (because the book’s world is awful, so typically the more differences I can find, the better).  In Lowry’s speech, she touches up on feeling safe and comfortable in what we know, which I feel is one of the reasons we are sometimes hesitant to criticize our own worlds, because like in our world and in ‘the community’, since we don’t know much else, we don’t always know how anything else would be like. 

As my last bit of research, I found out that in 2011, they were coming out with a movie of The Giver.  Anxious to see the trailer, I went on youtube, but only could find kid’s school and personal project versions of what they think the trailer should be like.  I found them all to be similar, in the way that Jonas’s world looks so sad, scary, and gloomy.  It’s interesting, because I took the community as a happy place, (unless you know the truth like Jonas).  The thing about the community is that the people in it are (or at least think they are) happy.  They don’t know any better, so they live with and fine greatness in the life they live.  This simply shows how differently everyone interprets the book.

In conclusion, through research, I truly understand how this book came to be, and how our world is so ‘not what meets the eye’.