Reading in Dystopia

In her book, The Giver, Lois Lowry offers a utopian society that has attracted children and adults alike into its seductive depths. Popular since it’s publication in 1993 it has won not only the highly regarded Newberry Medal, but a top spot on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books,” a distinction it shares with some of the finest and most progressive achievements in children’s and adolescent literature. The novel is centered around Jonas, a young boy living in a controlled community where “sameness” prevails and “family” is rooted in compatibility over biology. The community, and it is assumed the world, has achieved a passivity and compliance that echoes Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; there is no pain or fear, but neither is there love nor happiness. Language in Jonas’s community has been modified to precision, leaving no room for abstraction. Development, too, has been altered and predetermined to inhibit variation: children know they will receive “comfort objects” and clothing at the same age as the others in their “group.” They will get bicycles at nine. Their vocations at twelve. Should they apply for a spouse the Committee of Elders will select a suitable choice based on compatibility. Even reproduction is regulated as Birthmothers produce offspring to be allocated to qualifying families. They are not forced into submission by an omnipotent dictator, unlike Anthem and 1984, the members of the community do not even possess the awareness that it is possible to live in any other way. Not only has the need for choice been eradicated, so too has the idea.

The only person aware that such complex thought even exists is the Receiver—a human archive of memories from the time before Sameness responsible for guiding the community’s decisions concerning issues with which they have never experienced. Almost a martyr, the Receiver must bear pain of his memories, as well as the isolation of his position for the sake of the community. Chosen to be the new Receiver, Jonas is telepathically given the memories of his predecessor, known to him as the Giver. For the first time Jonas experiences love, color, and snow—alienating him from his friends and family who could never begin to fathom such things and prompting us as readers to not only see the limitations of perfection, but to question our own perceptions of reality and how assumptions effect that perception. It may be argued that The Giver is not meant to remind us that pain and love are contingent upon one another and the necessity of both, but rather of the similarities between our own world and Jonas’s.

There is a moment of realization in The Giver when Jonas first meets his predecessor and describes the burden of his memories.

“It’s as if…” The man paused, seeming to search his mind for the right words of description. “It’s like going downhill through deep snow on a sled,” he said, finally. “At first it’s exhilarating: the speed; the sharp, clear air; but then the snow accumulates, builds up on the runners, and you slow, you have to push hard to keep going, and—”
He shook his head suddenly, and peered at Jonas. “That meant nothing to you, did it?” he asked.
Jonas was confused. “I didn’t understand it, sir.”
“Of course you didn’t. You don’t know what snow is, do you?”

Just as Jonas does not understand snow, we too are left befuddled, unable to comprehend a world in which something so simple and obvious can be misunderstood. We assume there is snow and color in Jonas’s world because there is snow and color in our own and until told differently there is no reason to imagine the world existing in any other way. Lowry does not reveal the absence of such seeming trivialities until more than halfway through the book and up to that point it might be assumed that the vast majority of readers filled in the gaps of the novel with characteristics attributed to their personal lives and surroundings. Jonas’s community is so appealing for precisely that reason; it is so bare and void of substance and emotion that we as readers are able to project ourselves, along with our acquired knowledge and identity, into it. It is only after we become aware of what has been sacrificed to achieve perfection does it lose its attraction. It is impossible to imagine a life bereft of the very concepts of love and desire and so the mirror in which we could once see ourselves turns dark. Though, arguably, this speaks to the inherent hypocrisy of Lowry’s book. Do our own cultural assumptions not guide us as they do the members of Jonas’s community? Though capable of thought, emotion, and choice we are constantly guided by cultural expectations. The way we dress, eat, communicate, even rebel are all in compliance with societal standards. We believe our lives to be natural because that is all we know, yet our community is just as constructed as Jonas’s. Just as the community in the novel cannot even fathom love and pain, we cannot fathom a world without it.

The Giver, it may be argued, is a commentary on reading, and subsequently perception, more than anything else. It challenges readers’ own communities, questioning their ability to see the world free from influence. In a way that might have been intended to persuade young readers of the value of books, à la Fahrenheit 451, Jonas notes upon entering the Giver’s room: The most conspicuous difference was the books. In his own dwelling, there were the necessary reference volumes that each household contained: a dictionary, and a thick community volume which contained descriptions of every office, factory, building, and committee. And the Book of Rules, of course. The books in his own dwelling were the only books that Jonas had ever seen. He had never known that other books existed.

It is the act of reading that separates us from, not only Jonas’s community, but from other works of dystopian literature frequently assigned in schools. As is the case in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1949) and Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), books and the act of reading signify knowledge and intellectual development. Their ubiquitous presence in middle and high school classrooms may be seen as a response to students who might just as well rather go home and play videogames or watch television. (Something that I always found to rather hypocritical on the part of educators who try to force meaning, contradicting the value of free thought that these novels advocate.) Cautionary tales warning of the danger of illiteracy, and subsequent ignorance, these novels, with The Giver, promote the necessity of intellect. It is not the act of merely existing that makes one human, but rather to “be,” one must exist in relation to a larger community. Similarly it may be argued that Jonas’s community, though it is exists in the literal definition of the word (hinting at their fixation with the precision of words), exists in no larger context. The use of the word “community” was deliberate on Lowry’s part and though there an acknowledgment of other communities, Jonas himself says “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”

To read requires more than just the literal comprehension of symbols. We read not only books, but the world around us and we are constantly expanding our understanding through accumulation. Our perception of everything we see is shaped by what we have already seen. Colorblindness not only differentiates the community in the novel from our own, it represents their inability to see and marks their existence as merely biological. It is Jonas’s capacity to “see beyond” that allows him humanity—an understanding of death and empathy. It’s hard to say if there really is “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”—I wouldn’t know.