The Giver

[ModernArchitect]

I read this book back in 5th grade along with "Adam of The Road" my girlfriend had this obsession with it so I read it again. This book is like a childrens vision of "Anthem". Are there any other thoughts. Like the rules of the reciever of memory? It is him being given the right to be an individual. The pills they give him to reprise the "Stirrings" (Basically when he is getting horny) just like the "Anthem" the comparsions are uncanny. Ayn Rand just takes it there fully.

<FC: Fixed the thread title written in CAPS. Please don't write this way in the future.>

Edited January 4, 2005 by Free Capitalist

[non-contradictor]

I read it around the same time, and again when I had to read it for seventh grade English. In particular, the scenes when the jobs are assigned are practically identical in both books. (Ugh.) Then there is all that talk about the kids needing to learn interdependence. Yuck. I got the impression from the book though, that the author was trying to convey one of those "you have to have pain to have happiness" kind of deals and this gave pain too much weight for my liking. I thought that there was too much emphasis on what the people felt and not enough on what they thought which led them to feel nothing. However, that was a couple of years ago so I could be forgetting someting... Either way, it does have a lot in common with Anthem, and compared to a lot of the trash they make us read in school, it was excellent.

[Samoht]

Spoilers for the book

I read The Giver recently in my Literature for Adolescents class. It is required for those of us future high school teachers. I loved it (beat the hell out of To Kill a Mockingbird), however I have not read Anthem yet. The aspect that I enjoyed the most was the one individual (Jonas) against the evil society that he is surrounded by. He never doubts the evil of the society even though he and the Giver are the only two who see anything wrong and knows what the right and moral thing to do is. Instead of allowing the city to torture him to prevent their own pain ( he had to relive the memories of different people and animals through history) he grabs his brother Gabe, commits a capital crime by stealing a bicycle and has to spend the rest of the book hiding from fighter jets searching for him.

I was first introduced to this concept in R.A. Salvador’s Dark Elf Trilogy (Homeland, Exile, Sojourn). It is very similar in concept of a lone hero who leaves an evil society and refuses to allow his skills and mind to be used to support it. It helped give me strength in resisting and fighting drug and gang culture I lived around. I do not know the name of the genre, or if there is a name for it. Anthem (from what I have heard about it), 1984, Brave New World and The Giver have the same themes and styles and should be placed in their own genre. I know Rand considered the use of Science Fiction Romanticism an apology for using Romanticism because it sets the story outside reality, but I wonder if that is because she just did not get science fiction.

Anyway, did you think that Jonas and Gabe died at the end, or did you think they made it to a new town? The argument in my class became very heated, despite the fact that the last five pages of the book contained an interview that gave the definitive answer. I was the only one who read it.