Chapter 17 & 18
1.-By not taking pills, the change has affected Jonas in many ways, such as emotionally and physically. The main changes in his emotions are how he feels towards his friend Fiona. Fiona in the book is just another female in the community, but by not taking the pill that suppresses his feelings, he feels stronger emotions than friendship with Fiona. The pill helps to suppress the feelings of possible love towards other people in the community, as that could lead to stronger emotions, such as hate towards other people, because of relationship problems. This presents a risk of an inaccurate choice, as in an inaccurate choice of a mate. “…allowed to choose their own mate? What if they chose wrong? “Then Jonas proceeded to mention how funny if would be if people could choose their own jobs. I realize that this isn’t all that funny when I see that in the normal world as it is now, people choose their jobs and mates every day. Every day, thousands, possibly millions of people get married, or chose a job. SO? It’s not going all that badly is it? I think that is why the community made this rule that you can’t choose your own mate. I suppose it is because sometimes it was unsuccessful and someone failed at it, so instead of letting people use emotions to see whether they like their partner or not, they decided to completely depend on logic. At one point in the book, it mentions how Jonas’s parents were a perfect pair, that his father was slightly lower in IQ, but better for raising children, and that his mother was higher in IQ but not as good at taking care of children. This shows how much control the community has, even over human attraction.
- Also, because Jonas had not taken the pill, he has allowed more emotions and memories. I think the pill not only suppresses basic emotions but also removes memories if encountered. This is important to the community to suppress memories because they might even have stronger affects than emotions, because they might not only be about themselves, but might also be about someone they love. This could then create stronger emotions not only for themselves, but also for others. This creates a very special opportunity for Jonas because he has memories, unlike all the other people in the community. If he does not take the pill, then that allows him to probably see the memories more clearly. Because the pill also suppresses emotions, he probably also feels stronger emotions. I think that is why he is seeing colour more and more, because his memories aren’t suppressed into some corner in his brain.
- By not taking the pill, it has given Jonas the first taste of what choice feels like. By making the choice to throw the pill away symbolizes how he is taking his first step towards attempting to make the world back into the world that we are in today. Also, it symbolizes that he is trying to earn a life of emotion, happiness, pain, and satisfaction. Because throwing away the pill is a choice of yes or no, it will probably lead to more choices in his life, eventually making Jonas’s life full of choices, so he can live life normally, in our perspective. He only wants to do this because he’s had a taste of what life ‘normally’ can feel like, so he wants to have it in his community all day without having to relive the memory to temporarily have it. This is partially the Giver’s fault because it was him who transferred the memories of the sled and other entertaining things to Jonas.
- I suppose now that Jonas has thrown away his pill, he feels his emotions more strongly. “Shallow impatience and exasperation that was all Lily had felt … reacted with rage that welled up so passionately… “This quote shows that Jonas now knew what was Lily was really feeling, and that she was not really angry at all. Then he realized that in this perfect community of theirs, no one would actually feel real sadness or anger, because everything was so well controlled. Impatience and exasperation are similar to the lowest level of anger, in which the person enduring it doesn’t feel all that provoked, but when Jonas mentions real anger, I knew immediately that it was not from his normal life, but from the memories that he had of the past situations in his memories. This allows Jonas to not have to endure all the memories and gives him the privilege to endure without having to go through actual pain, only very clear and very, very realistic memories of pain.
- I realized after I reviewed the previous point that what Jonas was undergoing was ‘real’ emotions. “They were deeper and did not need to be told. They were felt” what Jonas was referring to was the emotions, and that he felt more strongly about emotions that were more realistic. To him, emotions were more than a tether to normal society, as the community uses them as, but also symbolize more about how a person acts or what he/she is like. Instead of going through the ‘fake’ emotions that are extremely simple to describe, such as sadness (as Jonas’s mother describes on page 132) or anger (as Lily describes on page 131) Jonas has memories and skips all that and goes straight to the more ‘advanced’ emotions, which include grief, hunger, depression, love, despair, and so on. These emotions are extremely difficult to describe, as Mr. Gazen showed us by saying “describe love”. Most of our class made very crude attempts to describe love, such as “to like someone a lot”. Then Mr. Gazen reacted by saying “what is like?” then we were stumped. From this situation I realized how hard it is to describe some things, emotions especially.
2. This quote shows clearly that Jonas is starting to have thoughts about elsewhere and how to get to it. Now that he knows that there is colour and emotion and there are memories in the world, he knows that they must come from somewhere, and that is what led him to the thought of the river coming from elsewhere and going to elsewhere.
The river is significant towards the future of Jonas’s perspective because it represents the beginning of a chain of thoughts. The river now has colour in Jonas’s perspective and also gives him a completely different perspective over things. Instead of viewing the river as a risk of drowning, he views it as a chain of memories, which hold many experiences of many generations. By viewing it in a way that he can connect to (he is the receiver of memory after all) he sees it better and more clearly than he would if he didn’t have memories or the capability to see colour. This leads to think of what might happen have happened in the river before because he made the connection of thinking about Caleb, the four that drowned
The connection between the river and elsewhere began to threaten his beliefs about the community. Now that he sees that the river can hold so much beauty even though his community does not have any makes him think that maybe elsewhere is better than where he is now, the community. This clearly is jealousy or wanting, and these feelings were only spurred on by the memories of better places to be and memories of colour and emotion.
Because Jonas has a different perspective of thought than the other people in the community, he has the thought that if the community has a border, then that must mean that there must be other places, or elsewhere. He wouldn’t have thought this thought if he didn’t have memories of a better life because that would be questioning authority (“is there a better life somewhere else?”). This is entirely spurred on by the fact that Jonas has now acquired curiosity through his memories. He probably has memories of an explorer going into unknown lands and he might want to be one, like a child who wants to be an astronaut. Because Jonas was exposed to these future decisions later in his life than a toddler, then he must only be starting to have the thoughts of a toddler or a 3 or 4 year old (“I want to be a pirate when I grow up” that type of thing) and the first thing that occurred to him that he can do is that he can become an explorer because he realized there is so much more places to go, and things to see.
Also, by seeing the river, Jonas imagines it more like a line that connects things, by mentioning that it came from elsewhere and it went to elsewhere meant that he things that the line is linking something. The problem is that he forgot to mention that it ‘passed through here’. Assuming that because he can see the river in his community, the river does pass through ‘here’ and this is what Jonas is really thinking, not that the river goes from there to there, but actually from there to HERE to there. By thinking like this, which is his old way of thinking, he gives himself no chance to think that he could go along it and actually lead himself to elsewhere.
Also, the final connection that he might be having is that on the same page ( page 131 ) he describes that he sees the river in the community differently because he had seen “lakes and streams that gurgled through the woods; and now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently”. This shows that he is trying to make connections from his memories into his real life and he truly is seeing his entire life differently. It seems like the river is only the beginning of a chain of thoughts that would lead Jonas to rebelling or doing something that the community might not want him to do.
3. I think the things that Jonas lost are his friendship, his pastime, his memories of his own life, or childhood, and he was reminded of the pain that so deeply affected him.
Jonas lost his friendship when he had the nervous breakdown in front of all his friends. When they played the war games without knowing of what war did to mankind, Jonas was reminded of it because he now had to bear all the memories ever known to man. He was absolutely sure that war was horrible and he was determined to put a stop to it before his friends had to endure the pain of it. The problem with Jonas’s thinking is that it is flawed in one way, his friends know nothing of what harm war is, but know nothing about what advantages it has, and so they play it completely for entertainment purposes, which means that if they didn’t know what advantages war had, they would never try to start a war. It’s as if someone wants to go biking. They might be very young, such as six or seven and might not even know the advantages of biking and the disadvantages of biking. This leads to a completely luck based decision. I have seen kids flipping coins for a large amount of choices they don’t know about, such as going with one friend to a party or another friend.
Another thing that Jonas is worried about losing is a pastime. “It was a game he often played with other children … a harmless pastime … he had never recognized it before as a game of war”. This shows that now that he has memories of the same thing happening before but with real guns and weapons. Even though his friends aren’t exactly using real guns and bullets, Jonas makes the connection and is reminded of the memory that tortured the Giver and also himself. He relives the memory, but in real life, and because he realizes his friends are playing the same game, he can’t bear to imagine them undergoing the same pain as he did when he lay in the trench with the other soldier in his memory. This makes him think that he has lost a harmless childhood pastime because he now has a completely changed and negative perspective of it.
Another thing Jonas lost when he saw his friends playing war games was his childhood. When he was a child and not yet a receiver, he was unaware of what war really meant. By receiving the memory that the Giver gave to Jonas he now comprehends what the true meaning of warfare is and what damage it has done to society. Jonas is afraid of losing his childhood because if he tells his friends about how destructive war had been, they wouldn’t understand, but if he didn’t, they might have the risk of growing up into more violent people. I think Jonas is thinking of this too seriously and he might be overestimating the result of this. I have seen small children (maybe 7 years old or lower) playing shooting games by making their hand look like a gun and shouting out “Bam! POW! Kabam!” whenever they want to fire their “hand” guns and they aren’t violent at all, it’s just as the book said it is “a harmless pastime”. I don’t think it is that easy to make a kid want to shoot someone in a war.
When Jonas saw his friends playing their war games, he was reminded of a pain that he had almost forgotten. When his friends played war games, he was reminded of real war and pictured his friends in the horrible memory that the Giver had given him. By being reminded of the memory, he had to undergo the pain again and that probably caused him anguish. “Choking feeling, as if it were difficult to breath” this must be Jonas suffering the same pain he had suffered in the trench, which might have been thirst, because that was what a parched throat feels like, really dry and stingy, and also because the boy next to him begged for water and then died.
4) I think the concept of release seemed a significant factor for a few reasons, such as fear that the Giver will die, curiosity of what release is, the question of why and how Rosemary was released.
Jonas is scared that the Giver will die for several reasons. First of all, he is afraid that the Giver will die because the Giver is a source of happiness in his life. The Giver always gives Jonas good memories and actually cares for him, unlike his father and mother. Only the Giver possesses other emotions other than him, and so the Giver can care for him. This reason is very important to Jonas because unlike us now, he only has one person actually caring for him, after the reality of the situation Jonas is in was exposed to him. When he realized that the town didn’t really truly care for him and that it was only for efficiency and retaining that fake society feel, he realized that the only person who he really knew and could interact with well was the Giver, because the Giver would be the only person who understands his ranting and him talking about all the things that he learned in the memories. I think the Giver is happy to have Jonas too because now the Giver can share his thoughts with SOMEONE without having to give them the memory and talk for a long time just to tell the person to call an extended mound a hill, for example. If the Giver or Jonas did not exist, the other one of them would feel much lonelier, because they would have no one to pass their memories to. I think that is one of the prime disadvantages to the society that Jonas lives in, the people with no memories have friends who don’t really even care about them, and the receivers don’t have friends but they comprehend emotions so they can care for others.
Jonas is probably curious of what release is for several reasons. For one, it is probably because there was going to be a newchild released the same day. Because the newchild is being released the same day, then Jonas must be thinking about it. Jonas’s father is the one ‘releasing’ the child, and because of such a close connection (his father) Jonas connects and wonders what release actually is. By bringing up this topic, it shows that Jonas is still curious about many things in the community.
Jonas was probably curious of how rosemary was released and just basically the process of release for Rosemary. He might have made a connection, although I am not too sure, to the plant named Rosemary, which –after I did some research- is actually called the plant of remembrance or associated to remembrance. The interesting part was that the Giver had some trouble saying her name aloud, and that it was considered socially awkward to say her name, possibly because the community wants nothing to do with Rosemary after her death
5. I think the memories are kept away from the normal people for safety purposes only. The reason they are all given to one person is because they have no other way to put it. At that point in the future, people were probably scared of pain, and were too fearful that they might die, so they pretty much brainwashed themselves into thinking that there is no such thing as pain in the universe, and they invented this theory of release, which probably only covers up death, or some sort of euthanasia. By giving the memories to the Giver, the last thing that’s stopping them from having a technically perfect life is gone, memories. By having memories, people will have emotions, and emotions tend to lead into trouble, or so the people in the community think. This is simply another illusion, that there has to be more risk in the life we live now than pleasure. I agree that there is risk, but I really think smarter people can make risk seem fun. Risk also gives us the ability to appreciate life as it is now (at least were not dead?). I think the loss of the receiver would be a problem because then everything that they’ve done to make a perfect community would be ruined, and everyone would have memories again. It would be a disaster because then the citizens would realize how much of a secret they haven’t been allowed to know, and the community council will retaliate by saying that they didn’t know about it either, which will probably just end in a disaster which could lead to huge amounts of destruction.
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