The Giver question

I don't think that the fact that memories are gone have anything directly to do with colors. I think that taking colors away is another way to make it more of a dystopian society and to make everyone more similar. It's like the whole dress situation, is it blue and black or white and gold... people see colors differently and with everything black and white, there are no colors to see differently. And it is not that people are grey, it is just that everything is black and white (or shares of grey)

The book is good. What I think of the color is that they don't want people judging others by the color of their skin, like they did with Martin Luther King Jr. I think they don't want wars on what people look like, so they make them look pretty much the same.

I was thinking that in so trying to block out anything painful that could hurt them they they also insulated themselves from joy so they lived in this beige "safe",robotic,controlled world where no one had choice or opinions and nothing was questioned .So the lack of color was a metaphor for this narrow existence they had eked out. I think the color coming back was seeing things as they really were. Returning from the zombie like existence of what they had created and been told. The memories of the past were even gone so they couldn't learn from them or want more. It so reminded me of about 30 years ago meeting a young woman from a strict communist country who couldn't choose even the work they did. They were tested at a young age to see where their strengths lied and they that was what they studied and nothing else. Anyway, that is my $.02 worth. I hope I made sense.

I agree with Jojo completely.

In The Community, all the children are genetically modified when they're born to perceive no color. The color doesn't correlate with the memories.

The colorless realm is part of the original story and the influence of 'Sameness'. Color would indicate individuality and a difference that wasn't arbitrarily mandated such as the assignments for the 'twelves'.

If we are not taught the names of colors, we don't learn them. We many 'see' them but they have no conscious meaning in a world where they are not noted and defined.

They purposefully removed color from the community when it was created, with the intention of making it uniform and peaceful, because no one would feel jealous of another person for having a different hair color or something.

They don't want people to have any differences, even if it's only the color of their clothes. That would involve making choices, and then the choices would be different, which would make the people less boring and maybe even give them creative ideas! Once people have ideas, they are much harder to control, so possibly the city would fall apart, since they don't have any real punishments other than- what's it called- Leaving. I think it's called Leaving.

Sarah wrote: "I don't get why people are gray, they're colorless! Just because all the memories are gone, doesn't mean that color will be gone. I love this book so much, and it's awesome. What do you guys think?"

The absence of color made the community to be kind of unique, like a uniform, uniform is the word...gave them that is why all of them were geneticalyy modified. It reminds me in a certain way of the movie Gattaca