The Message of the Giver

The Giver by Lois Lowry has the obvious message that, in her opinion, a Utopian socety can't exist if the population is aware of what they are missing by having total equality.

In The Giver the society is completely controlled, everyone has the same birthday, their jobs are assigned to them, and nobody sees color. There is no pain, no sorrow, in fact, no real emotions. The theme of this novel is the fact that no matter how perfect a Utopian society may appear to the world, the society can never be truly perfect in human standards.

Humans are born with the natural instinct to want to achieve, to succeed, and to dream. So, the only way the society in The Giver could work perfectly, with all the citizens having the same jobs, income, number of children, and birthday would be for the citizens to not know what they were missing. Thus, the giver was introduced. He recieved ALL of the memories that were not part of the mass that the citizens were supposed to know, good and bad. So, there was only one citizen who had to live with the horrors of hunger, thirst and disease.

The message of The Giver is obviously that although life may be hard and difficult at times, the human mind and body won't be satisfied with just the minimum, we will always strive to achieve and do better.