Omar Syed

 The Republic and The Giver

            Utopian culture usually implies a perfect world. Plato’s Republic and Lois Lowry’s The Giver detail Utopian life. I’d read The Republic in high school and read The Giver as part of a young adult fiction class and they exemplify what Utopian literature is all about, bringing an image of an idealized or perfect community, and then showing the world that life isn’t so perfect when there’s no conflict or motivation left in the world. As much as Plato and Lowry presented a very attractive world view in The Republic and The Giver, I could see there were pitfalls (such as no real attachment to anyone or anything as the result of rules such as having birth mothers or removing all sexual urges completely). At the basest level, I simply wondered if anyone else had tried to compare the two literature works.

Unfortunately, I had quite a hard time finding anyone who had already compared the two works of literature, though Monica Juneja makes fleeting mention of Plato’s work in her article “On the Margins of Utopia—One more look at Mughal Painting”, but no mention of Lowry’s The Giver.

Which brings me to another point; the fact that Plato uses the terms “the giver” and “the receiver” within The Republic where he in no way implies Lowry’s characters of Jonas and the Giver, left me with many dead ends as the search engines, both public and those at the UHCL library mainly gave me Plato’s words and nothing on Lowry. In the end, I was inadvertently forced by my own fruitless searches to use blogs that I’d found as the result of mere Google search engine searches.

Objective 1a asks how to define the utopian genre. The Giver falls into the category of Utopian Literature by, as an article from the Eastman School of Music course site explains that, “The Giver by Lois Lowry [deals with] a society [that] is thought to be Utopian, defined and derived from the Greeks as “an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system.” However, we find soon that Jonas’ community in the novel is a dystopia, as defined by the the Eastman School of Music course site as “an often futuristic society that has degraded into a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian.”

In terms of Objective 3f and seeing what changes occur in various venues, the rules hold the people of Jonas’ community in The Giver accountable include, as a 7^th grade school course site relate, there is no lying, and you must use precise language. These two rules in particular exemplify the ideologues of Plato’s Republic and fit like Lego bricks to the restrictions on music and the stories that could be told, as Zashuna notes in an essay comparing Orwellian literature to Plato’s work, “Plato censors any idea that may negatively affect child development.”

The 7^th grade course site page continues, that rules such as “You must take pills for stirrings” and “You can only have two kids, one boy and one girl” relate directly to Socrates’ notion of birth in The Republic, The “stirrings” that are referred to are sexual feelings and preoccupations that occur when youngsters initially become sexually sentient and these rules in particular naturally go along with other rules regulating decorum and restricting nudity such as “Adults and children can’t look at each other nude”.  The article continues that birthmothers are the only people in the community allowed to give birth, which fits directly with Plato’s terms in The Republic; in Jonas’ community, each family that is assigned children are given only one boy and one girl, thus mirroring Socrates ruling that, as Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. notes, “The Guardians will even have their families in common. Children will be raised in common and will not know who their real parents are. These children will also not be randomly conceived. They will be bred deliberately to produce the best offspring” and “Since children will be raised in common, individual women will not be burdened with the task of child rearing and will be free to take their places in their proper occupations along with the men.” Compare Plato’s words to the Giver’s conversation with Jonas on page 124 and 125 of The Giver, where Jonas learns about the feeling of love through a memory of Christmas celebrations and where he focuses on the concept of grandparents, realizing, through the Giver’s explanations, that he could never truly know his “parents of parents” because his own parents are assigned to him and, if they are still able to work in the community, would be assigned to new children after he and Lily were fully grown with assigned families of their own. Just as with Plato’s view of “children will be raised in common,” so too does Lowry’s planned community allow full equality, but no fairness as no person can have true attachment to anyone or anything as a result of the shifting of parental responsibilities based on ability to work productively.

            mpanzer notes in an article that “The Giver by Lois Lowry [has] connections to Plato’s Republic (more specifically the Allegory of the Cave”, that the Cave analogy involves the concept that the community that Jonas lives in is indifferent to its world and doesn’t actually “feel”, Jonas learns the truth from the Giver and is shocked and burdened by the reality the Giver discloses to him (mpanzer also notes that the Giver would have been a Guardian in Plato’s work). Jonas’ community’s lack of feeling and lack of knowledge of the true reality is taken directly from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave where prisoners are chained to a wall with a fire casting shadows on the wall. The prisoners create a reality based on the shadows they view, but Plato says how a philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and views the real reality outside the cave, he no long has the need to imagine a pretend reality via shadow images from the fire in the cave. Thus Jonas has seen the true reality for what it is, though the Giver, while his friends and family continue to live in their world of shadow images, feeling nothing and not truly living.

            emmacxoxo writes in an article that “‘perfect societies.’ -- include Plato’s The Republic, as well as Lois Lowry’s The Giver, in which a society is placed under incredibly harsh constraints in order to achieve what is believed to be a perfect society. However, the harshness of Plato’s instructions as to how to run the ‘perfect’ society, as well as the chaos and rebellion that inevitably occurs in The Giver, illustrates the difficulty that goes into establishing and maintaining these perfect or utopian societies.” Perhaps what emmacxoxo has left out is that the difficulty to maintain an Utopian society involves control over the patrons and citizens of that Utopain community by Plato’s Guardians or Lowry’s Community of Elders.

In conclusion, it's unequivocally clear that The Giver is based on Plato's work, including The Republic and the Analogy of the Caves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

http://esmancientgreeks.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/lois-lowry-meets-socrates-the-giver-and-the-repiblic/

http://www.nssd112.org/northwood/!!!teachers/lomonaco/thegiv~1/RULES.HTM

http://mpanzer.blogspot.com/2010/07/some-words-on-lois-lowrys-giver.html

http://www.friesian.com/plato.htm

http://bookstove.com/classics/orwell-and-plato/