Blog Post 2

I chose to extend my thinking from the Guided Reading List with number four. Number four required me to: "Track quotes about pain throughout the book. What is Lowry trying to share with the readers about the pain? do you agree with her? Why or why not?" I enjoyed digging deeper into this topic and uncovering hidden metaphors throughout the book.

These are my quotes that were strongly describing true pain.

• "You have never experienced that. Yes, you have scraped your knees in falls from your bicycle. Yes, you crushed your finger in a door last year." Jonas nodded, agreeing, as he recalled the incident, and its accompanying misery. "But you will be faced, now," she explained gently "with pain of a magnitude that none of us can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The Receiver himself was not able to describe it, only to remind us that you would be faced with it, that you would need immense courage. We cannot prepare you for that." (Found on pages 62 and 63)
• "6. Except for illness or injury unrelated to your training do not apply for any medication." (Found on page 68)
• "From the distance, Jonas could hear the thuds of cannons. Overwhelmed by pain, he lay there in the fearsome stench for hours, listened to the men and animals die, and learned what warfare meant." (Found on page 120)

Lois Lowry is trying to maintain a thread of fear through out the book to show what the community thinks it means and what the Giver and Jonas experience it as. The experience of fear is what the Giver wants to past to Jonas, but the community wants nothing to do with this feeling and continue living as if fear is an emotion that never reaches a serious pinicle. 

Fear hangs over the everyone within Jonas's community, but the Giver and Jonas appear to be the only two who want to feel it and understand it. Both the Giver and Jonas were selected to bear all the memories that existed before Sameness, which was  the time when the land was diverse with hills and valleys, colors shone, and warfare and pain were real. I don't think they learn about these negative emotions because they were chosen to do so, but because all their lives they understood life in one dimension. For example, saying you are hurt and feeling pain are completely contrasting because when you feel an emotion you can connect to it but saying you've felt it leaves you wondering how that emotion feels. The Giver and Jonas want to say they have been pained and have truth in it while the community says they have  just to say it. The questions to think about is: if pain is too much of a burden for the community to carry why would they want others, who live so peacefully, to be selected to carry their fears and worries and what would they do with emotions such as pain if there was no Giver? Jonas and the Giver appear to be the Elders' and the community's treasure chest that they can heap everything they don't want to deal with onto and not not think about again.

In conclusion, the quotes of pain and my analysis of how the Giver, Jonas, and the community view are unique and diverse and seeing it through each pair of eyes is really interesting.