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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

4:37 PM

A few days ago, we went through some questions about the Assignments in Jonas's community in our cooperative learning groups. The three questions posed were:

Do you think all the Assignments are equal and respected? Why or why not?
What does the system of allocating people their Assignments reflect about the society Jonas lives in?
The Chief Elder claims that the Assignments are a way of honouring differences. Does this ring true? Based on your knowledge of other parts of the novel, is Jonas's society one that values sameness or difference?

All those questions made me ponder and reflect upon the Assignments given and look at it from a different perspective. When I first read "The Giver", I did not pay much attention to the Assignments tasked out. I did not realise how significant they were until I did this exercise during lesson.

For the first question, all of our answers were the same - no. We did not think the Assignments were equal and respected as for example, in chapter one, Father had complained about night-crew nurturing being assigned to those who lacked the interests or skills or insight for more vital jobs in the daytime. This shows that the night-crew was "a lesser job" and thus proving that not all Assignments were equal and respected.

Before going through this exercise, I never really noticed how the Assignments were not all that equal, especially since Jonas's community stresses on Sameness, and the third question works toward that doubt.

Moving on, what struck me for the second question was that Lowry had actually made a connection between the system of allocating people their Assignments and the society that Jonas resided in. I had known that fact until then.

My group shared the answer that both the system of allocating people their Assignments and the community was rigid and controlled.

The system of allocating people their Assignments was rigid because only the Elders could decide and the people had no say in it. In the community, the people also could not make choices as everything was the same. They also had to follow the strict orders and rules of their community.

When I found out about this link, I was very intrigued and elated to have found out about this fact. I started to think about other links and connections Lowry made in "The Giver". I realised that there were many other connections like the pale eyes and having the capacity to see-beyond.

Lastly, the third question made me agree even more on that a utopia can never exist in this world.

A brief answer for the third question:

No, this does not ring true. The Assignments do not honour all differences as Assignments like Night-crew nurturing, Sanitation Labourer and Birthmother were not really honoured in their community. Furthermore, Jonas's society is one that values Sameness so how can it be that the Assignments honours differences?

This shows that no matter how hard you try to create a utopia, it will never work out. There will still be cracks and flaws in the community and there will eventually be dystopic elements in your "utopia". In fact, in Greek, 'utopia' is a two-part word, as most greek words are. When broken up, 'utopia' actuualy means 'no place'. 'U' means 'no' and 'topia' means 'place' in Greek. Thus, as the word suggests, there can never ever be a utopia in this world.

*Please note that the answers for the questions in this post are my brief answers and not the full one.

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