The Giver #1

 It was a nuisance to keep oneself covered while changing for games, and the required apology if one had by mistake glimpsed another's body was always awkward. He couldn't see why it was necessary. He liked the feelig of safety here in this warm and quiet room; he liked the expression of trust on the woman's face as she lay in the water unprotected, exposed, and free." (pg.30)

In the novel The Giver Jonas is the narrator and main character. He is an eleven year old boy that works in his community. He volunteers at a lot of centers, and helps people out. The Giver is like God, because only he knows the truth. This quote is from Chapter 4 where Jonas starts to realize that his community is not everything that he may think it is, he starts to realize that something is missing in his society. He realizes this when he was training to be a “receiver” when the Giver showed him what it was really like to live in a utopian society.It is not allowed for a women to be seen nude. In this quote we can also that Jonas is not like everybody else in the book. I believe he used the word free because she is naked.   In this novel so far the word “human” in Jonas’s cases means that you are living in a dystopian society and you do not get to see the real world and what your society is really like because of the strict rules and regulations that are in place by the government in your society. In Jonas’s case the word “human” is not used correctly because I believe that if you are a human you are free and nobody has to tell you what to do, you are capable of making your own decisions whether you are wrong or right. So far in this novel the word “human” is being incorrectly used in my point of view because Jonas is not living “free” like Larissa and the Giver. Our deceptions of the future reveal that the present is a time to cherish because it may not be there for long, you need to cherish the good things in life that are available and at your dispense now because one day they are not going to be there. In Jonas’s case he needs to go with the Giver so the Giver can guide him to the utopian society that Jonas envisions, not the dystopian society that Jonas is living in now. We use language and images to manipulate people’s minds by only showing what people want to see. People want to see all the good things, but do not want to see the bad so people often make it seem like everything is alright and good so people don’t get scared. In Jonas’s case he thinks his society is perfect because he is only seeing the good, not the bad. So the Giver introduces Jonas to the bad of society and then shows him Larissa who is actually living in a utopian society, unlike Jonas.