February 20th

Today in class I brought up the comparison between Notes from the Underground and The Giver, a young adult novel by Louis Lowery, and I think for this post I going to expand on the comparison. The Giver describes utopian society that gradually unravels to show what had in fact always been a dystopian society. The society in The Giver resembles that of what Dostoyevsky believes Darwinians think humanity will reach, where every decision is reasoned and there is no free will. Louis does something very interesting in the novel when he every person in the community, except for the protagonist, is unable to see color. This almost perfectly reflects Dostoyevsky’s claim that the humanity that Darwin and his followers wanted would have been ridiculously bored. I feel that Dostoyevsky’s theories show up a lot a many popular contemporary and it is very interesting to see what they are all based off of.