The Giver and Pleasantville

Everything Has To Change
The Giver by Lois Lowry and the movie Pleasantville are examples of people trying to attain a perfect society. The point of view of both stories is third person omniscient. The audience knows or gets a clue to what is going to happen before the characters do. Both settings of the story are colorless and very structured in the beginning, but as the story goes on they become colorful and fluid. Some of the characters in these stories have a will for things to change, and they are not fighting to keep things the way they were. The main conflict for both of these stories is that people and things are going to go through changes whether people like it or not.
Lucas from The Giver is a young boy that comes to realize all the experiences that his community is missing out on. Bud from Pleasantville is the same but different, he does not realize this until a little farther into the story. Both main characters make drastic changes; they become very brave when they figure out, they are the ones that have to make change happen. Although Lucas and Bud are very similar in their bravery, they are very different in how they handle the difficult situations. Lucas does not go around helping people change; he knows that they have to do this by themselves with the memories he gives them. Bud on the other hand guides his peers into this world of joy, happiness, and pain. He helps them discover who they really are.
Lucas’ and Bud’s family units change quite a bit in the end of each story. In the beginning they both have a kind of balance in their family, but near the end that balance slowly disappears. In Bud’s case, his mother realizes that she does not want to cook and clean all the time, but that she wants to do things that she enjoys. His father realizes that he loves his wife for more than her cooking and cleaning. Then there’s Mary Sue who changes from a girl who is wild and does what she wants, to a girl who studies and wants to learn more about things. Lucas’ family will end up making changes after their community receives the memories from Lucas as he gets farther and farther away.