In Lois Lowry's The Giver, children receive a new responsibility each year during the ceremony days. At the beginning of the story, Jonas's sister turns eight, but she is mostly excited for the next year when she turns nine. Children who turn nine receive bicycles. The bicycles give children more freedom to travel around town, but they also require more responsibility because the must also take care of them. When Lily gets frustrated with her hair ribbons one morning in chapter six, Jonas reminds her she gets to start her volunteer hours at age eight and that there are many good things to receive each year. For example, Sevens receive jackets with buttons on the front rather than the back. The symbolism behind the jackets is explained as follows:
The front-buttoned jacket was the first sign of independence, the first very visible symbol of growing up. The bicycle, at Nine, would be the powerful emblem of moving gradually out into the community, away from the protective family unit (52).
The above passage also explains the meaning behind the bicycles given to children at nine years of age. By chapter 10, however, Jonas recognizes something different on his bike after receiving his calling in life during the Ceremony of Twelves the day before, as follows:
During the night the nameplate of each new Twelve had been removed by the Maintenance Crew and replaced with the style that indicated citizen-in-training (91).
The nameplates on all of the new Twelves' bikes now say "citizen-in-training." This means Jonas and his friends have, in a way, graduated from childhood and are now expected to act like adults. They still go to school, but instead of volunteer hours, they train in their decided fields of work for their future jobs. This is significant for the children because they now know which direction their lives will take; and for the community, these new citizens-in-training partially enter the workforce and contribute to society. Symbolically, Jonas and his fellow Twelves are considered adults after their ceremony and the bikes' nameplates help commemorate their rite of passage.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
In chapter 10 of Lois Lowry's The Giver, what is different about the bikes after the twelve ceremony?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
Lionel Wallace is the subject of most of "The Door in the Wall" by H.G. Wells. The narrator, Redmond, tells about Wallace's li...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe, is a novel. A novel is a genre defined as a long imaginative work of literature written in prose. ...
-
In Celie's tenth letter to God, she describes seeing her daughter in a store with a woman. She had not seen her daughter since the night...
-
Let's start with terms: "expected value" means the average amount that you would win or lose over a large number of plays. The...
No comments:
Post a Comment