When The Giver told Jonas “Welcome Receiver of Memory,” on page 75, it was just part of the story. But now it’s, loaded with symbolism in this sentence. All the people in the story don’t get to know the history of the past, but this sentence shows that there is history in the book and that someone is going to find out all about the history and memories. The Giver, by Lois Lowry, has a theme of memory/history and three examples in the story, are Jonas, animals, and elsewhere. In this essay you will find why these are representing memory/history.
First Jonas is an example because he, shows history and memory for lots of good reasons. In the story the Chief Elder said, “Jonas has been selected to be our next Receiver of Memory. ” Meaning that Jonas is going to be the person who gets to hold the memories for the people, and help them to make important decisions for them that require more knowledge than the council already has. The Giver in the story said, “It’s the memories of the whole world. ” This means that there are memories in the story and that someone gets to have them, but not everyone gets to have them.
That is very important because it means generally that when Jonas gets all the memories no one but him will have them. When Jonas thought about the people never knowing pain, that meant no one in the community got to feel pain and he’s the only one that knows about it. In the part when Jonas said to Asher, “You had no way of knowing this. I didn’t know myself until recently. But it’s a cruel game. In the past there have been–” That is a part in the book where Jonas is trying to share the past with other people.
At the part in the book where Jonas was testing Asher with the flowers, it meant he was trying to see if anyone else could perform a memory at all. All of these reasons show that Jonas represents memory and history. Next the animals in The Giver help us understand the history and memories in the book, because they were always being used in memories of the past. When you reach the part where there were dead soldiers and horses everywhere, this shows that there are animals in Jonas’s visions of the past. The elephant in the story was killed in the past. So in the future there aren’t elephants, and in the past there were.
Elephants also are symbolised as wisdom and knowing, everyone in the book doesn’t have knowledge of the past. So it’s pretty f past. So it’s pretty funny that it was an elephant in the book. In the future of the book to when Jonas gets to know Gabe, everyone thinks Gabes stuffed animal is a hippo, but it’s really an elephant. These thoughts about elephants shows that the people in the Givers community don’t have knowledge over past animals. All in all animals were used to represent the past, because the majority of the people never knew about the animals from the past.
Lastly Elsewhere in the story represents history and memory. One reason why elsewhere represents the past is because people in the story could choose to go to elsewhere at any time. But in the book every time someone wants to do something they need to ask. They never really make there own decisions, without an influence from someone. But in the past everyone got to choose what to do.
In the book when they were watching someone get released to Elsewhere Jonas said, “He killed it! My father killed it! In the past, death was the word people used, but the community in the book used the word Elsewhere so in a way Elsewhere is death, so elsewhere has always been around therefore it is a memory and history. At one part in the story Larissa said, “This morning we celebrated the release of Roberto,” “It was wonderful. ” This simply means that a woman remembered this mornings release, but she said it was wonderful, so she really didn’t understand Elsewhere is death otherwise it wouldn’t have been wonderful. She didn’t know what death is either because she doesn’t have the memory of the past.
All in all the story the Giver has history and memory hrough Elsewhere for these reasons. In The Giver the overall symbolism for memory and history is that everyone in the story has memory of their own life, or peoples lives that tell them what there life is like. But they don’t have any memory of what society was like until the community was formed. However part of their community has been balanced through the help of someone with the memories and history of the world, this person is used as an adviser over the past. They get to learn more about the past through books. In The Giver Jonas and the Giver were the people who got to use the history of the world.
That’s how Jonas gets to represent history and memories. Animals get to represent history and memories in The Giver because there aren’t animals in the present time set in the book. So whenever they are talked about they are from history. Elsewhere shows history and memory because in the story elsewhere was equivalent to death, and death was a word used in the past so it means a past word. People in the story also get to remember people in their lifetime that got sent to elsewhere, so they had memories of the past elsewheres. All in all Jonas, animals, and Elsewhere all represented history and memory in the story The Giver.
