The Giver

Summary

Jonas is eleven and lives with his father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, his mother, who holds an important post in the Department of Justice, and his younger sister Lily in a tidy, enclosed Community where nearly everything is decided for its citizens. Families are assigned, each with one son and one daughter; babies are born to Birthmothers and given out at the yearly December Ceremony; children receive bicycles at Nine and jobs at Twelve; precise language is enforced with public apologies; everyone takes a daily pill once the Stirrings of adolescent desire begin; and those who break the rules three times, the old, and newborns who fail to thrive are "released" to a vague Elsewhere. The climate is controlled, the land is flat, and no one sees color. At the Ceremony of Twelve, while his friend Asher is made Assistant Director of Recreation and Fiona is assigned to the Caretakers of the Old, Jonas is passed over and then named the next Receiver of Memory, an honored post exempt from the rules of rudeness and permitted to lie. In the Annex, an old man who asks Jonas to call him the Giver begins transmitting to him, through touch, the memories of the world before the Community chose Sameness: a sled ride down a snowy hill, sunshine and then sunburn, the color red he has glimpsed in an apple and in Fiona's hair, a broken leg, hunger, the killing of an elephant, a battlefield where a wounded boy begs for water, and, at last, a family gathered by a Christmas tree with grandparents, which shows Jonas what love was. He learns that a previous Receiver, Rosemary, could not bear the painful memories and asked to be released after a few weeks, and that her memories then flooded back into the people. Meanwhile his father brings home a fretful infant, Gabriel, who shares Jonas's pale eyes and sleeps calmly when Jonas passes him soothing memories. When the Giver shows him a recorded release, Jonas watches his father cheerfully inject the smaller of newborn twins and dispose of the body, and realizes that release means death. He and the Giver, who reveals that Rosemary was his daughter, plan Jonas's escape so that the memories will return to everyone; but when Jonas hears that Gabriel is to be released the next morning, he flees early by bicycle with the baby, hiding from search planes by covering them both in memories of cold. Starving and freezing in snow-covered hills, he finds a sled and rides it down toward a house with colored lights, hearing music, and the novel leaves its ending open. Houghton Mifflin published the book in 1993; it won the 1994 Newbery Medal.

Top Lessons

• A world without pain is a world without love

  The Community has given up snow, color, war and grief, and with them it has given up the deep feeling Jonas finds in the memory of the family Christmas. Lowry shows that sorrow and love come into the world together, and that a people protected from one loses the other.

• Naming hides the truth

  The Community calls killing release, sends its unwanted to Elsewhere, and corrects children who use words loosely. Careful language is used to keep people from seeing what they do. Jonas's father is not cruel; he simply has never been given the words or the memories to understand his work.

• Wisdom needs memory

  The Elders consult the Giver because only he remembers what happened when people chose badly before. A people that forgets its past cannot judge well, and one person carrying all the memory for everyone is lonely and overburdened.

• Choosing costs something

  Jonas learns that choice is risky: people might choose wrong. Yet his own escape with Gabriel is a costly choice made for the sake of a life. Lowry places the value of freedom in the willingness to protect others, not in doing as one pleases.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Several of the Community's institutions read as medicine put to the service of social control. Release, presented as a ceremony and carried out by caregivers, is a lethal injection given to the old, to rule-breakers who ask for it or are sentenced, and to newborns judged unable to thrive or born as the second of identical twins; Jonas's father performs it in the same tender voice he uses for feeding. The daily pill taken from the onset of the Stirrings suppresses adolescent sexual feeling, and Jonas notices that his emotions sharpen when he stops taking it, which invites discussion of pharmacological emotional blunting, though the novel names no drug and describes no mechanism. Pain itself is removed from ordinary life; minor injuries are treated at once with medication, so that Jonas's first memory of a broken leg and a battlefield wound is a revelation. The House of the Old offers careful but impersonal care, with bathing and feeding by trained volunteers. Rosemary's request for release after receiving painful memories can be read alongside discussions of suicide and of grief, but the book frames it within its own invented customs. These are thematic readings of a fable, not portraits of real clinical practice.

• Chapter 5

  After his dream of Fiona, Jonas's mother explains the Stirrings and gives him the first of the pills he must take every day.

• Chapters 4 and 7

  Jonas bathes Larissa at the House of the Old and hears of Roberto's celebrated release.

• Chapter 12

  The Giver transmits sunburn, Jonas's first experience of pain beyond the scraped knees that are instantly medicated.

• Chapter 15

  Jonas receives the memory of a battlefield where a wounded boy dies asking for water.

• Chapter 19

  The recorded release of a newborn twin by injection, performed by Jonas's father.

• Chapter 20

  The Giver tells how his daughter Rosemary, overwhelmed by painful memories, asked to be released, and how the people suffered when her memories returned.