The giver chapters 11 & 12

THE GIVER CHAPTER 11-12                               BRUCE

1) When Jonas receives his first memory, he had a what i would call a perplexed feeling. He was ‘surprised’ as he called it and seemed to enjoy the experience. He described in detail the emotions and sensations he felt when he was having that memory. He described snow as a sensation of tiny pinpricks, and then realized that they were not pinpricks because they were soft and were cold. He also said that he could see his breath, which is not all that amazing to us nowadays. When i read this part of the story, i realized how unappreciative we are of the things around us, and i realize that you can only appreciate the way Jonas did if you have never known anything about what you are experiencing. Also, i realize that when Jonas relived the memory, he automatically perceived the word for everything. Normally, in our world, we don’t automatically know everything as soon as we see it, and it shows how different Jonah's society is. Later on, as Jonas has an exhilarating ride, he realizes that the thing he was on top of was not an extended mound, but a hill, and what he was going through was snow, and what he was sitting on was a sled propelled by runners. He perceives all of this in fractions of a second, and soon understands what the giver means by what he said.  This part of the novel illustrates how unperceptive the people of the community are of what happened in the past, because they never question it. Because no one has known what a rebellion is, no one tries to attempt one by saying “we want hills” or “we want snow”. This shows how in control the council has everything. The people can barely think for themselves.
2) I think when the community went to ‘sameness’, they decided to forget or destroy all things that are not a benefit to their society. Things like snow and hills were an annoyance to society, and so they decided to destroy all hills. This clearly shows how even though they are making the world better, they are still being lazy, which is an attribute that humans cannot possibly abandon. Humans will attempt to find a way to do everything the simpler way because they are to lazy to take the harder option. The removal of hills were only a demonstration of the capabilities humans have over nature. The book also mentions the removal of animals. This could have been because they appeared useless to humans. This signifies that all the people adopted being vegetarian, which is a large amount of people. This shows how much people are dedicated to making their life less of a nuisance. In the process of removing all the animals and nature, they also destroyed entertainment, because there can only be entertainment if there is difficulty, because there can only be challenge if there is difficulty. By creating this dystopian world, the community has abandoned difficulty, but also abandoned pleasure.
3) This phrase indicates that the elder still desires to have fun, but cannot have fun because it is impossible. What i mean by this is that the elder still wants to have entertainment in life as well as difficulty. This also shows that he had rather have more difficulty that success in his life rather than nothing at all in his life. “but the choice is not ours”; i think this signifies a small weakness in spirit. The Giver does not have enough self confidence to go against the council. I notice that the Giver seems to care more about Jonas every day, and seems to take pride in Jonas, something a member of the community would not normally do. He shows this when he transfers the colour red to Jonas. He uses red in a different way, kind of not a colour, but an emotion. When he transfers the colour red to Jonas, he instantly makes connections to the ‘apple incident’ and the incident with Fiona's hair. This shows to some extent that the Giver is trying to merge his lessons into Jonas’s life so that he can try to beginning to have emotions. I say this because when he transfers the colour red in the form of elephant blood, it gave the strong emotion of sadness, or fury. This shows that the Giver is trying to tell Jonas something more than the colour, but also the feeling.
4) i think the Giver gave Jonas a memory of pain because it tells what it used to be like in the world. I think the Giver is trying to establish the idea that pain was natural before, and when he is transmitting memories, there will be more pain than good, and that pain is not easy to handle. The giver is also trying to make Jonas understand what made the community go to sameness. Jonas described the sunburn as a burning feeling, and he couldn’t move his face without going through pain, but after the experience he described it as interesting. I think he described it as interesting because the theory of that type of pain was completely new to him. The intake of pain seemed new to him, even though he had undergone falls off his bike, and that time he slammed his finger into the door, but he had a ‘relief-of-pain’ (probably some sort of aspirin or polysporin medicine) and did not suffer much. I think that is why the receivers cannot request a relief-of-pain because they have to endure the pain so that they can learn from it and make wise decisions.
5) I think the something that Jonas was referring to was the home of the person who created the memory. He wants to go there because in the memory, the person who created it is about to go back home, and as Jonas relives that memory, he also feels the need to go back home. The idea of a home was still in a way new to him. Sure he had a family, a home, but it didn’t seem complete, now that he had seen the homes in his memories. He felt that there was something missing, and i think what was missing was love. When whoever created this memory, he actually had to go through the experience, but when Jonas is reliving it, he does not have to, he only has to watch. In a way it is like watching TV. Even though it is very smilier to watching TV, he also perceives feelings, which you can’t when you’re watching TV. The emotions is what is driving him to get to the ‘wherever-it-is’.
6) As Jonas clearly stated earlier in the book, he saw an apple ‘change’, the crowds ‘change’, and his friend Fiona's hair ‘change’. These changes present a regularity, and shows that all of the changes have to do with one thing. When the giver says it is something called colour, I realized that not all people in the community saw in colour. This colour is a key aspect in the emotions the elder wants to transfer to Jonas. The Giver is aware that the concept of emotion is very new to Jonas, and he can’t force progress, but the difference in his vision is already common enough for Jonas that he won’t be shocked by it, and so the Giver uses it in a clever way to make red show emotion. As i previously stated, red can represent emotion as well as colour, and when the Giver transferred the memory of the dying elephant to Jonas, he also transferred emotion along with the colour. By transmitting the situation, Jonas learned that one thing can represent many different things and the colour red can represent pain and beauty at the same time.
7) I think the people made the choice to go into sameness so that inconveniences were removed, and life could be lived fully. What the people were not aware of was that if you had no pain, then there would not be any pleasure. The choice of going into sameness was made by the people in attempt to right themselves from all problems. The problems probably occurred when people destroyed the world. A group of people decided to isolate themselves from society and live life as this community and they decided to go to sameness to separate themselves from the rest of the world.  I think the advantages of going into sameness is that no one feels separated. No racism, no hunger, no poverty, and everyone is on an equal level. This makes some sort of a balance, and no one has any bad feelings about anyone else, but no one truly loves anyone else either. I think what was lost in the creation of this Dystopia was the will to experience. When the community was created, everything became the same, and the chance to experience something different entirely disappeared. This is what enforced the rule of sameness, the fact that no one had any experience with anything else.

thnx for readin!