Monday, March 31, 2014

In the book The Giver, what is a description for Jonas's bedroom and the dining room?

In The Giver, Lois Lowry offers a
purposeful lack of description of Jonas' physical surroundings.  His sleeping room
consists of his bed and, on some occasions, Gabriel's crib, but aside from that we are
given no details.  It does have a door and seems to be the one place in his dwelling,
and perhaps in the whole community, where Jonas can have any real privacy.  We know it
is the one room where Gabriel can sleep through the night without much fuss, but this is
due to Jonas soothing the child with his "memories" rather than to any physical
attribute of the room.


The dining room, too, lacks real
description.  It is the place where the family shares their dreams after the morning
meal and significant events from their day after the evening meal.  Much of the
interaction between Jonas and his parents occurs here.  Beyond a table and chairs,
however, we never really get a sense of what is in the room.  In fact, we get a sense
that it is not a separate area at all.  When family members move from the table to the
shelf, desk, or cupboard, it does not appear that they leave the room.  In Chapter 5,
Lowry describes Jonas' mother cleaning up the morning meal and then placing the tray by
the door for the Collection Crew to retrieve.  This tells us that the family does not
cook their own meals, and therefore their dwelling does not need a kitchen.  We might
speculate that aside from the sleeping rooms and, presumably, a bathroom, the dwelling
consists of just one large room.

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