The Giver is a Utopian setting.

[Dramapuppy]

Yes, but in a classic dystopian novel, the world immediately appears bad. This is more than that. It is a dystopian community, yes, but the writing style is false utopia. Because at the beginning, we don't see how bad the community is.

[random name]

Well, not necessarily. In the beginning, the man that accidently went the wrong way and he was "released." Seems pretty malicious to me. That's one of the dystopian environment rules.

[Stacie]

Rachel wrote: "On a related rant: ""what's with the sudden surge of dystopian novels lately?" I shudder when I hear this. The Giver was published in 1993, long before the Hunger Games, Divergent or any of the cur..."

Actually, I just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and I think it is the most frightening/compelling dystopia I have read, second only to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Brave New World was published in 1939. It is also a utopia, but a few of the citizens and one "savage" aka normal person on a reservation figure out that there was once science and art and religion and individualism and try to regain it. It is phenomenal how ahead of his time Huxley was but also how the book hasn't aged.

[Mirkat]

Look back to Thomas More, who coined the word "utopia" with his Utopia . His aim was to posit what he considered to be an ideal society. Lowry was not trying to sell the world in The Giver as an ideal society, although its residents might have been under the impression that it was. The reader is clearly meant to find the faults and horrors embedded into this society's structures, and in my mind, that puts the novel clearly into the "dystopia" category.