The community celebrates something they call the “Sameness.” This is the repressive equality that extends throughout the whole community. This is tied to other complex issues of free will and diversity. He feels differently than other characters do, experiences emotions more fully and completely. There is one opinion, something Jonas runs up against throughout the novel. In The Giver, everyone believes in the same things and in living the same way.

If someone were to express the opposite, they’d be called out, perhaps ridiculed, or chastised. The politically correct opinion is the one that most people hold. The latter is the debate surrounding what is appropriate in everyday conversation, which topics one should be able to bring up, and which opinions someone can express. These include euthanasia, diversity, free will, and political correctness. Readers of The Giver will find themselves confronted with some quite difficult social topics. It has fallen over the thin line that separates a successful, safe society from one that’s repressive. Although the world that Jonas is a part of it is less outwardly dystopian than those in 1984 or A Brave New World, it has the same structure. The word utopia, famously, means “nowhere” or “no place,” suggesting in its an impossibility and that any attempt at creating a utopia will necessarily devolve into a dystopia. But, utopias are more complicated than they might initially seem. In this volume, he used the word to describe a seemingly “perfect” society that protects people from the worst parts of humanity, a perfect definition for what the community in The Giver is trying to do. It is equally important to speak about the opposite of a dystopia, a utopia, and its origins with Sir Thomas Moore in his book Of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia, usually shortened to Utopia. The Giver is perhaps the most important novel of the genre aimed at a young adult audience. Other novels like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess are equally important. Readers who are familiar with the world of The Giver are likely also familiar with the worlds created by George Orwell in 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s impossible to talk about The Giver’s literary context without mentioning the many essential novels that came before Lois Lowry’s and solidified the dystopian genre as one worth exploring.

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