Hannah Rayner Blog Post 7

I have chosen my primary source to be the novel The Giver by Lois Lowry.  The Giver follows a young boy named Jonas as he explores the futuristic society he lives in and his new role called the Receiver of Memory.  The world he lives in has no pain, fear, war, or hatred.  The society is made to be uniform so there is little to no competition. Jonas, however, is different from the others in the society.  He has increased levels of perception. This makes him different from his uniform society that appears to be a utopia. The society is trying to make life as happy as possible and goes great lengths to do so. For example, this society has taken away choice from the children.  When the children turn 12, they are assigned a job based on their interests and their abilities.  Even adults have the ability to choose taken away from them, as each citizen in order to have a spouse has to apply for a spouse and is assigned a partner that is compatible with them.  The couple, after they are paired together, are given two children.  The society even makes negative aspects of life seem positive.  Death is made to seem like a joyful experience, as the people who are “released” go to a place outside the community known as the Elsewhere. 

This source fits into my interests with the dystopian genre as it relates to the issues I discussed in my first essay about uniformity vs. uniqueness.  It appears that Jonas has something that the other characters do not have, just as Tris was different from the other characters in Divergent. I also think that it will be interesting to look at the parallels between the three young adult dystopian stories we have learned about.  It appears that all of them have an important ceremony in which the character chooses something or something is chosen for the character.  I think it will be interesting as well to compare the three young adult dystopian stories we have learned about to an adult dystopian film.  It appears that the three young adult stories we read all discussed a dystopia that appeared to be a utopia, while Mad Max appeared to be showing a purely dystopian society.