The Giver by Lois Lowry

As human beings, it’s difficult to contemplate what we would be like without the millennia’s’ worth of memories that follow us. Lowis Lowry’s The Giver explores what it would be like to live in a world that purged these memories, in addition to sophisticated emotion, many rights, and even the perception of color, and started over. The book is written from the point of view of Jonas, an eleven year old existing in this dystopian society. When Jonas turns twelve, he is assigned a vocation along with all the other children his age. However, Jonas is placed in a unique profession, he is chosen at the Ceremony of Twelve to inherit the position Receiver of Memories. This job means Jonas will be given all the memories other citizens lost from the Giver, or previous Receiver. As Jonas gains more memories, he learns to see through the lies and into the twisted truth of his “happy” community. Jonas soon has to question what is the right thing for a people to retain: liberty and knowledge or happiness and ignorance?

         The utopian society in which Jonas resides has been altered to insure the contentedness of its citizens. “The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”  No one need worry about colors, pain, sorrow, or love. Deep feelings and vibrant, impactful memories are extracted by either time or medication. The striping away of collective memory not only takes away potentially painful experiences from human history, but also prevents the people who live in this world from wishing to engage in potentially harmful activities (hurtful relationships, etc) or dwelling on nostalgia for the things they all gave up to live in this idealized society. While to the modern American reader, one who has grown up being told that freedom is the key to happiness, everyone in this world is content. “They were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrance his (Jonas’) own was taking on.” Nobody living in this community knows any different than the “sameness” that has existed their whole lives. They’re happy without pain, happy without color, happy without knowing beyond their own, sheltered bubbles.  Jonas, once he starts to experience these memories, is frustrated by the ignorant contentedness of his family and everyone around him. “I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid,” he says. This is, while understandable, a sentiment coming from someone who was happy before painful memories thrust anguish upon him Jonas could not have previously imagined. The pain of someone given these memories is so intense that the previous receiver of memories asked to be released, or killed, rather than endure the pain. “The Giver shook his head and sighed. ‘No. And I didn't give her (the previous receiver) physical pain. But I gave her loneliness. And I gave her loss. I transferred a memory of a child taken from its parents. That was the first one. She appeared stunned at its end.’’ While Jonas feels the need to give people pain and free will, he doesn’t consider that they may be better off without the pain it causes. This difficult grey area shows the constant moral and philosophical struggle throughout the novel between understanding and peace.

         While the citizens of this utopian land are happy in their callowness and stupidity, the experiences Jonas acquires as the Receiver of Memories convince him that they would be better off with a greater depth, understanding, and quantity of pain in their day to day lives.  The abilities that allow Jonas to experience life on a deeper level than the rest of his community prompt him to imagine a world where everyone understood what he understood. “I liked the feeling of love,' [Jonas] confessed. He glanced nervously at the speaker on the wall, reassuring himself that no one was listening. ‘I wish we still had that,' he whispered.” Jonas enjoys the pleasurable things he gets out of his position, such as affection and the ability to see color. These are interesting capabilities; they bring both a newfound metaphorical and literal color to life that he sees missing in his life. At first, there seems to be no downside to filling the rest of society with what Jonas has come to learn. However, Jonas soon learns that there is more to memories than happiness and love. “He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those. They were deeper and they did not need to be told. They were felt.” Jonas’s life had, until that point, been filled with simple negative emotions, people were, on the surface,  “sad” or “angry”, and these emotions found their roots in problems that were easily fixed. However, as the Receiver of Memories, he is faced with anguish and pain that cannot easily be remedied. They were deep, backed by years and years of torment and experience in the memories he was given. Was it worth giving up a content, albeit passive existence for this pain? “Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.” The meaning Jonas finds in these newfound emotions strengthens his belief that they need to be shared. While sometimes excruciating, they are what he believes bring a meaning and comprehension to the world that is necessary to live at full capacity. This exemplifies the difficult choice Jonas has to make, choosing agony and comprehension over blind contentedness.

         Lois Lowry’s novel expresses a common dilemma, whether it is right to sacrifice depth for serenity. This question is the topic of many dystopian fantasies. We find it interesting to imagine worlds in which our understanding of the world shrinks because our analytical and emotional intelligence is so much of what defines us as a species. While a dog may be able to think about how it will get it’s next meal or experience superficial pleasure, humans are able to feel things beyond ourselves and thusly be more connected to our environment, others, and us as individuals. Loss of this ability would almost take away our humanity, and so we wonder where we would be without it. Books that explore fantasies like this one allow us to find importance in things we take for granted, and that’s why they are so widely and deeply loved.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Exactly how far can a human being possibly be pushed? Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi pushes the protagonist, Piscine, “Pi”, Patel to his limits in this epic survival story. Pi, a god-loving Indian boy raised in his parents’ zoo, lives a colorful life filled with the animals of his childhood and multiple religions. When the Prime Minister of India enacts martial law,

Pi’s parents decide to leave their native home, Pondicherry, India, sell most of their animals, and board a Japanese cargo ship headed for Canada. Halfway to their destination, the ship sinks unexpectedly, leaving Pi on a lifeboat with a hyena, orangutan, zebra, and a tiger named Richard Parker. As we follow Pi in his months long journey across the ocean, we are constantly questioning the effects extreme circumstances can have on someone who is in a dire situation.

            Piscine starts his life off extremely connected to his principles. He is a devout Christian, Muslim, and Hindu. He sticks strictly to his vegetarian diet and pacifist lifestyle. He is quick to defend both his father’s zoo and his religion(s). “I have heard nearly as much nonsense about zoos as I have about God and Religion,” says Pi. He’s a thinker, analyzing everything he sees and applying them to his beliefs. “The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything,” he says, “is the bane of not only theologians but also of zoologists.” This thought comes from years growing up on a zoo, an experience that, as you can see, has shaped his lifelong principles.  Most of the first section of the book is Pi’s reflection on the world around him, lines like this: “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation,” demonstrate the depth of the roots of Pi’s philosophies in his mind, the sheer frequency of these thoughts and the sureness with which he demonstrates them makes it clear their importance. Pi is so connected to his beliefs that he even defends his following multiple religions, without once backing down, to his religious leaders and his imposing father. This behavior illustrates how Pi keeps his faith and principles close to his heart. One would never think that they could ever be stripped away, and yet Pi’s experience on the lifeboat tells a different tale.

            After the ship sinks, Pi spends months and months stranded in the middle of the ocean with only a live tiger for company. As you can probably guess, it’s difficult to maintain practices such as vegetarianism when food and sanity are scarce. Pi is broken when he kills his first fish. “I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It’s a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred. I never forget to include this fish in my prayers." Pi’s reaction to his first hunt reveals how extreme circumstances can make you do things you never would have done. Pi has been a vegetarian his whole life, and here he was, killing a fish with his own hands to eat. Eventually, he doesn’t bat an eye when killing a fish or a turtle. Being a vegetarian was a significant part of Pi’s personality, linked both to his religions and his childhood with animals. Vegetarianism is also linked to his strict pacifism. After time passes, we see Pi beginning to strip all of his previous practices away, as he says later, after killing a dorado, that “You may be astonished that in such a short period of time I could go from weeping over the muffled killing of a flying fish to gleefully bludgeoning to death a dorado. I could explain it by arguing that profiting from a pitiful flying fish's navigational mistake made me shy and sorrowful, while the excitement of actively capturing a great dorado made me sanguinary and self-assured. But in point of fact the explanation lies elsewhere. It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even killing.” The fact that something so close to his heart can be stripped away shows how events can change a human profoundly.

            Throughout this novel, the persistence of the human body and its willingness to survive is shown thoroughly. The human body protects itself by hunting fish, retaining water, and entertaining itself so as to not die from boredom. At the end of the book, it is revealed that Pi probably made up his elaborate story about the tiger and other animals in order to protect his mind from the stress of dealing with the actions of the people the animals represent. Perhaps the stripping away of disciplines that take lifetimes to build is only another method the brain uses to assist itself to withstand stressful experiences. If you were trying to, for example, maintain a peaceful and vegetarian lifestyle while stranded in the middle of the ocean with nothing to eat but fish, you wouldn’t last very long. Basic human instinct is to survive, and that instinct is so strong that it surpasses things like tradition.

“It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.”― Yann Martel, Life of Pi