ENGL 1302:037 Spring 2005
Due Tuesday 8 February
This is a five-page-maximum formal essay (as always, cite all sources fully).
There are obvious advantages to the society portrayed by Lois Lowry in The Giver: crime is almost unthinkable, the economy is orderly and productive, social tensions are at a minimum. Clearly Lowry has taken some tendencies and ideals of our own society to an extreme.
In the extreme world of The Giver, however, this orderly, utopian community runs up against human nature itself. Show, in a maximum of five pages, how Lowry's imaginary society fails when considered in the light of human nature. What elements of the Giver's society are simply, in the long run, untenable, and why? When you read The Giver, what features of human nature do you find unnaturally constrained or violated in the book's society? What is Lowry trying to say about basic human needs and desires -- which ones are too strong to be regimented in the ways her utopia demands?