The Giver: Discuss whether Jonas' assignment as the next Receiver of Memory is an honor or a punishment.

I believe that Jonas’ assignment as the next Receiver of Memory, is an honor. It has only a few negatives, but many important and serious positives. I will start with the negatives of this assignment. First of all, he is not allowed to discuss his assignment or his training (even if he did no one would understand him without the memories.) with his friends at school, like everyone else did, nor with his family at home. But what makes this assignment look different and weird to many people, is that they don’t really know what it is to have the memories. There are positive things about this assignment, but no one except the Giver and the Receiver can understand. They have the privilege to see beyond, and by that, receive the memories which show emotions, colors, music, places and weather-changes that don’t exist in their community because of Sameness. Jonas and the Giver are the only people in their community who actually know, with the help of the memories, how awful their community actually is. They know that everyone is pretending, without knowing it. They don’t know what marriage is or how a real and normal family looks like and acts like. And the most important, is that the Giver and the Receiver are the only ones who can change their community, who can change Sameness and make everything like it used to be a really long time ago. 

The Giver: Explain how Jonas' community is hypocritical.

Jonas’ community is hypocritical because they lie about the most important things in their meaningless lives. First of all, when kids go to school they always teach them to say the truth, and not to lie. But in the rules of Jonas’s assignment, it said that he may lie. So how does he know that no one lies? People might say that they are not allowed to lie, but after all we don’t know if in their rules it says that they could lie. When people get released, which happens almost every day, is all a lie. The truth is that when someone is released, is actually killed. When the Old get released after their ceremony, when they walk through that door, they go to the ‘lab’ where they put them an injection that kills them, and then put them in a box that is placed in a small door in a wall. Nobody knows that except from the Giver, the Receiver, and the people who kill them. But when innocent babies get released is very unfair. Just because they are twins, or they don’t sleep soundly at night, doesn’t mean that they have to be killed. Now what they pretend that release is, is that everything is good and nice, and people should want to be released. Also people don’t know much about release, there is not enough information given to them. The only thing that they know is that everyone is happy about it, and that when the Ceremony of Release finishes, they walk out of one door and nobody knows what there is behind that door. 

The Giver: Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of Sameness in Jonas's community.

There are many advantages of Sameness. The most important, is that people don’t fight between them and there is no war. Also, everything is fair, there are no poor and hungry people, and there are no rich, and full people. Everybody is equal. Also there are no slaves and people working under terrible conditions. Even though, kids might fall and scratch their knees, there is no serious physical, or emotional pain. The climate control is good for the farmers, because their crops don’t get destroyed. And the last advantage of Sameness is that there are no cars and pollution. So these people live in a healthy and quiet environment, and they exercise often by riding their bikes. Even though it looks weird there are not so many disadvantages of Sameness. First of all people don’t have a choice, they don’t have their own opinions, and everything is chosen by others for them. Everything is the same; they don’t have colors and music. They don’t choose their jobs, their husbands and wives, their food, their clothes, their names, and their houses. People don’t have their own birth day, and they celebrate their birthdays together on the same day. It’s like no one is an independent person and grown-up. The most important disadvantage that will shock you, is that people don’t have emotions, love, sadness, angriness, happiness, joy, and feelings in general. Can you imagine life without feelings? The people in that community don’t even know what these emotions and feelings are. Also the fact that they have a bike is tricky. They don’t have cars, airplanes, trains, metros, motorcycles, and any other vehicles, that can transport them to other places. And with the bikes you can’t go very far, because you get easily tired.