utopian society

i have a question about a book or short story i read in high school.
it was about a utopian society where everyone lived in happy harmony, but only because one helpless child was required to spend its life locked up in a cage in a dark room. the child represented the need to ballance good with evil. the society being so good that something really bad needed to exist to ballance it. and the plot of the story, i believe, had to do with some people deciding to leave the utopia becase they felt it was wrong, or deciding it really was worth it and staying there. the title might have something to do with "leaving". i would really like to know what it was called and who wrote it. if anywone knows please respond. thanks.
tdix

sounds alot like "the giver" or "gathering blue" but perhapse not

I think someone made specific referrence to it before on this site somewhere, not sure offhand though

I'm pretty sure the story your talking about is The Giver. The boy is Jonas and as soon as he becomes 12, they give the children different tasks to do, and he was selected as the new Receiver. This happened during the Ceremony of Twelve. He wasn't locked up in a dark room though, that was were he was being taught by The Giver and it was more like a work room or library with all the books on history they kept away from the community. Their community was unbalanced though because they only knew of good things, and Jonas was burdened with all the bad things that happened like war and killing, but he also knew of good things that no one else knew, like color. Everyone else saw in black and white and his first colour that he started to see was red. When he found out about how they "release"(kill) the elderly and how this new born was to be "released" because he had the lighter weight between the twins( twins wern't allowed), he was upset about it and he took the baby (Gabe) and hid him. Every time he got new memory, it changes the way he thinks about the community and he stops taking the "medicin" they give everyone. Because Jonas is now aware of emotion and how the government really works, he rebels against the restrictions his society places on freedom of choice, emotion, individuality, and human feelings. So with the help of the Giver, he runs away with Gabe and as he does so, he slowly releases the memory to his community. At the end, it just talkes about how they hear faint music from far away, but it never really tells us what happened in the end, which I found kind of frustrating. But in all, it was a really good book and it is one of my favorites.

Sounds like an interesting book - I'll have to read it.

It also reminds me a bit of the movie The Village.

Yeh, it is a good book, but I hope I didn't ruin the ending for you!

lol Actually I stopped reading your post when I thought it was getting too detailed so as to not ruin it. Thanks for the concern though.

Oh, thats good. Because if you finished it then you would of read the ending and most people don't like knowing the ending, so thats good.

really nice subject to talk about and i really got interested about that book too though i have never heard of it. can't say anything but i find it hard to just implement such a society inside ruins of the world we live in a place full of greed manipulation and power no one can ever dream of such society

tdix--
The Giver is a great read, but I think the short story you're talking about is called "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. You can find it in its entirety at teacherweb.ftl.pinecrest.edu/crawfor/apcg/Unit1Omelas.htm
I don't want to give any of it away, but definitely check it out...It's pretty interesting.