Jonas continues his training with the Giver. He starts getting darker memories past on to him. For example, the last horrible memory that he gets is been the middle of a war with thousands of soldiers dead or wounded. In a different memory, he also breaks his leg when riding down on a sled. Jonas and the whole community have a free day because its a holiday. One that day Jonas goes to find Asher. He finds his friend in the meadows playing war. When Jonas walks into the middle of the "battle field" Jonas's friends points an imaginary gun at him and start shooting him. This reminds Jonas of the horrific memory of the real war that he has seen. When Jonas asks them to stop playing war, Asher gets upset because he doens't understand how bad war really is. Fiona tries to cheer Jonas, but instead Jonas goes to the Giver. Jonas talks to the Giver about love. The Giver tells Jonas the story of what happened to the last failed receiver before Jonas. Her name was Rosemary. Rosemary did the same training as Jonas but when she got her first dark memory, she asked for release. She never came back.
Something else very important that happens in these chapters in that one night Gabe sleeps in Jonas's room. When Gabe wakes up Jonas goes to his crib to calm him down. Jonas starts patting and rubbing his back. Then a memory comes to Jonas and he suddenly losses it. He realizes that he has past it on to Gabe by accident.
What I thought about:
"They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely, and he rubbed his throbbing leg. He eventually slept. Again and again he dreamed of the anguish and the isolation on the forsaken hill" (110).
Pain is obviouslly negative. No one likes pain. But its important to think about how pain can make us learn. Without pain there wouldn't be relief. Without pain you can't really know what comfort is just like without night night you can't really know what day is. This quote is important because when Jonas learns about war and pain, he basically starts to lose his friends. That's because he feels so alone and isolated from other the rest of the community because he feels like he can't express himself. He can't tell them what he really things and feels.
"Jonas started at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory" (126-127).
This memory is about love. Jonas asks his father "Do you love me?" The father's response is that he shouldn't say that word because its meaningless. Jonas realizes that nobody in his community knows that love is. I think that this is shocking because how do you get married when you're not in love? More importantly, parents can't tell their children that they love them because they don't even have love. Its sad to think about a world with no love in it.
What I conclude:
This book has changes a lot since the beginning. At first the society looks well organized and like a nice place to life. But now we realize that everyone is color blind, there's no love, and there's no real families, since there can only be four members in each family and no one has grandparents, or even know what grandparents are. While it would be great to live in a world without war, it would be hard to live in a world with no real families and with no love at all.
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