preview

Inequality In The Giver

Good Essays

Equality’s Dark Pottential
Imagine a world where you were limited to do certain things. A world where you couldn’t be faster, smarter, stronger, or dumber than anyone else. Where nobody can see the beauty of color or remember important memories of the past. As Barry Goldwater once said - “Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” and well, the world with conformity and despotism, that’s the type world that the characters from The Giver and from “Harrison Bergeron” live in. The people from The Giver are being kept from seeing or thinking …show more content…

The true definition of equality has been misunderstood in these societies and formed a dystopia when the people were trying to create a utopia. These 2 stories prove and show that when the meaning of equality is wrongly understood, it can have a negative impact on society and the people them.

Equality, the harsh rules, and the secrecy negatively impact society in The Giver and proves that if equality is wrongly understood, it can have a bad impact on society. The impacts are shown clearly in many ways throughout the beginning of the novel in the society. The citizens all have to go through a day when they are “a 12” when they get chosen for their jobs in the future. The protagonist named Jonas is chosen to a very special job named the receiver. The point of this job is to receive the memories of the past to keep them from being released to the society around. There are many painful memories and happy ones. In one of his first happy memories, Jonas sees his first-ever glimpse of color and starts to have different thoughts about the black and white world around him. He reacts to the memory and says “‘But I want them!’” Jonas said angrily. “‘It isn’t fair that nothing has color!’” (Lowry 122). After this and

Get Access