The Giver (Lois Lowry) Essay

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Pages: 5

The Giver (Lois Lowry)

How does the community look and sound like? landscape, architecture, traffic and technology

»The Giver« by Lois Lowry is a novel taking place in the future. Jonas, the main character, lives in a community with other people. This community is very special and maybe it’ll be reality in a few years.

The community is like an independent city or village. You can compare it with a tribe. There are dwellings where family units live in (p.9). A family unit is like a family but a man is divided to a woman and they can apply for children. A boy and a girl belong to each family unit. Those dwellings are terraced houses (Reihenhäuser) (p.42) which are all in one area (p.29). They aren’t special buildings and there
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The community is technologically up-to-stand. They have well-grounded systems, for example the speakers: If a person breaks a rule, the speakers remind the people of the rule but there are no names mentioned. The guilty person know that he or she is mentioned and the people around know it, too, so it’s very obvious and takes effect. Also an important system is the system of medicine: When someone is ill and need pills or antibiotics he or she just says it into the speaker and a few minutes later the supplier rings and delivers the medicine.
Instead of cars the citizens use bicycles (p.9). They get the bicycles at the age of nine (p.17). It’s not said why they almost only use bikes. One reason could be that they are more environment-friendly than other vehicles. But there are a few buses and trucks, too (p.69, p.107). To have enough food the community has a landing field (airport) for planes that bring food (p.9). The planes mustn’t fly over the community (p.9). Apart from that it is just one road mentioned. The road connects the community with »Elsewhere«.
This road begins with a bridge crossing a river which represents a border of the community (p.20). The people don’t know the life on the other side of the river. It is another world for them. They just know the flat and well ordered landscape in the community (p.86). But the landscape was not always flat and well ordered: With the introduction of »Climate Control«, the hills that had