Why does Jonas find the instruction about lying so disturbing?
I think Jonas found the instruction about lying so disturbing for a couple of reasons. The first one is because since he’s in such a perfect society, lying would probably be against the rules and he also had never experienced it before. The second reason is because he probably thought that lying is a very horrible thing. Maybe even as bad as what we think about a crime. For example Jonas said "Finally he steeled himself to read the final rule again. He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie." (Page 70).
I think Jonas found the instruction about lying so disturbing for a couple of reasons. The first one is because since he’s in such a perfect society, lying would probably be against the rules and he also had never experienced it before. The second reason is because he probably thought that lying is a very horrible thing. Maybe even as bad as what we think about a crime. For example Jonas said "Finally he steeled himself to read the final rule again. He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie." (Page 70).
For the first reason, I said that since Jonas lives in such a perfect society, lying would probably be against the rules. I also mentioned that he had never experienced it before. What Jonas did not understand was that there is such thing as a white lie, which is lying for a good cause. All he knew was that lying is not right and he shouldn’t do it. That’s the way he was raised. I think he felt that lying is a form of rudeness, disrespect and also breaking rules. When he read the list of instructions, it said he was allowed to lie, but in such a perfect community, I think he thought there was no reason to lie about anything. His community had probably thought the same thing and made it a rule not to lie. It must have disturbed Jonas to think about himself lying to other people and then it probably would have made him feel guilty inside. Jonas isn’t like the others, but I think he still felt the same way as them about breaking rules.
For the second reason, I said Jonas most likely thought that lying was such a horrible thing. Maybe even like the same way we feel about a crime. I wanted to connect our society to Jonas’ by looking at the rules. Like in our community we have laws and if you break one, there are consequences and it’s probably the same for Jonas’ community with their rules. I think Jonas might have been scared to lie even though he was excused from that law. For example, if someone told you that you could commit a crime and would not have to go to jail; wouldn’t you still decide not to do the crime? For us it might not be so horrible to lie at times, but for them it’s against their law. You’re not allowed to do it! I think that’s why it really disturbs Jonas so much.
As a conclusion, I think Jonas was disturbed by being allowed to lie because it was against his rules. He was raised to believe that it was a really bad thing to do, and because there was never any point to lie about anything, he had never thought or dealt with lying before!
That was a rather interesting blog post you had there Natalie, I really enjoyed listening to the points that you made amidst the paragraphs. In my opinion, I think that you made good use of your own Idea's and the real facts in the book. It was pretty explicit! Although, I would prefer that you add a little bit more evidence and examples from the book. For example, in paragraph 2, you mentioned something about how in such a perfect community, there would be no such cause to lie. Where in the book did it mention that exactly? From what I've read so far, the book did or did not add anything about that term. If you could please elaborate more on such things, I would really appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you listed the your thoughts in the intro. and then wrote about each one later on. I also really liked how you included an example from the book. I definitely liked the way you exaggerated lying to be a crime, which it could be to an extent in Jonas' community. I think that was my favorite point that you mentioned. All in all I really liked your blogpost. You made lots of important points that really made me think (: Good job! (:
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