Skip to main content

In the book The Giver, why was Rosemary allowed to be released? Jonas' rules as a Receiver do not allow him to be released.

Sometimes we create rules in response to something that has happened, to prevent it from happening again. That is what occurs in The Giver.  When Rosemary was chosen as the Receiver, there was no rule that forbade her asking for release.  After five weeks of memories from the Giver, including various kinds of emotional pain such as loneliness and loss, she could not bear to go on. After getting the last memory the Giver gave her, of "a child being taken from its parents" (142), Rosemary asked the Chief Elder to allow her to be released. She could not bear to live with such feelings.  When Rosemary was released, all of her memories were released, too, into the general community, where people suffered a great deal, unaccustomed to dealing with any kind of emotional pain. So when Jonas is selected, this new rule is added, to prevent Jonas from asking for release that would expose the community to this pain again. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...