The Giver

Lois Lowry
1993

Introduction

When The Giver was first published in 1993, Lois Lowry was already a previous Newbery Medal winner (for her 1989 World War II novel, Number the Stars). She was also widely admired and greatly appreciated by an avid following of young readers for her comic series of Anastasia books. The Giver was immediately recognized as a very special novel. It too won the Newbery Medal. And a large number of commentators concluded that it was the best book Lowry had written.

Lowry's other work is mostly grounded in the cut and thrust of family life. The narrative of The Giver, because of the futuristic and allegorical themes in the novel, is a considerably more spartan affair. Readers are made immediately aware that they are in the realm of fabulous rather than realistic fiction, and that Jonas is the principle player in a moral fable with political and social overtones.

Lowry spent a good part of her childhood living near the Amish people of Pennsylvania. Later she moved to Tokyo and lived in an American compound within the city. Both experiences seem to have made her suspicious of attempts by communities to protect a rigid self-identity. She is careful in The Giver to make the community she is describing extremely plausible. From many points of view, it represents a well-managed social order. But as the reader discovers, along with Jonas, more and more about the principles on which that social order is based—infanticide, enforced euthanasia—it becomes impossible to read the novel as anything other than a savage critique of such systems.

Author Biography

Lois Lowry was born March 20, 1937, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents, Katharine (Landis) and Robert E. Hammersberg (an army dentist), were separated at the onset of World War II. Lowry spent the war years in Pennsylvania, where her mother's family lived. Early childhood influences included the presence of the Amish and an adoring grandfather. In 1948, when Lowry was eleven, the family was reunited in Japan, where her father was then stationed. In her 1994 Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech, she identified her experiences in Tokyo—living in the close confines of an American enclave named Washington Heights and making exciting forays on her bicycle into the Japanese streets—as amongst the significant memories which led to the writing of The Giver.

Lowry was educated at boarding school and Pembroke College. She attended Brown University but left after two years to marry an attorney, Donald Grey Lowry. She began writing seriously in the early 1970s, after all of her four children (born within a span of five years) were in high school. She was divorced in 1977, the year in which her first novel, A Summer to Die, was published. Prior to that, she had written two textbooks and a number of magazine articles and short stories.

This first novel described the relationship of two adolescent girls—thirteen-year-old Meg and her older sister, Molly, who is dying of leukemia. Meg gains sympathy and therapeutic friendship from an old neighbour, Will Banks, who encourages her interest in photography. (Lowry was, at the time of writing the novel, pursuing a parallel career as a semi-professional photographer. Her photographic work was used in a 1978 book called Here in Kennebunkport and on the dust jacket for The Giver.) The relationship between the two sisters in the novel also had a real-life correlation. Lowry's own elder sister, Helen, had died of cancer at a relatively young age.

Lowry's second novel, Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye (1978), confronted the issue of an adolescent, adopted child's search for her natural mother, but her third children's book was lighter in tone, and turned out to be the first in a series

of comic novels about Anastasia Krupnik. In the first, eponymous title, Anastasia Krupnik is a feisty and rebellious ten-year-old. By the time the series had reached its ninth title—with Anastasia, Absolutely (1996)—she was an equally rebellious, but increasingly self-doubting thirteen-year-old.

Lowry had won several awards for previous novels, but it was her 1989 war novel, Number the Stars, which brought her her first really prestigious prize, the Newbery Medal. Set in Nazioccupied Denmark, the book tells about the adventures of ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen, as her family helps the resistance movement to convey Jews into the safety of neutral Sweden. The Newbery Medal was awarded to Lowry a second time for The Giver, a book completely unlike the Anastasia stories. Those, in the words of Michael Cart, writing in the New York Times, colorfully depict a "believably flourishing functioning family," whereas the Community in The Giver functions clinically, according to a strict set of principles. One by one the rules and routines of the Community are clearly delineated. Jonas's apprehension as his twelfth birthday (the end of childhood and the time when the Chief Elder will announce individual Assignments) approaches is matched by the reader's growing unease at the description of community life.

Plot Summary

The Allure of a Perfect World

Lois Lowry's The Giver tells the story of Jonas, who lives in a futuristic society and who, until the age of twelve, has led a peaceful and normal, albeit regulated, life. Jonas has two parents, a mother who is happily employed at the Department of Justice, and a father who is happily employed as a Nurturer. He occasionally quarrels with his younger sister Lily, and he enjoys riding his bicycle, visiting with his friends Asher and Fiona, and musing about his future. In Jonas's world, everything (from an individual's desire, to the weather, to a person's career) is regulated. The community's rulers see to it, for example, that every member of this nameless, timeless community occupies a productive role in the society. The plot of The Giver develops out of Jonas's changing perceptions towards his community after he is selected to be the Receiver of Memory and discovers that nothing about his idyllic community is what it seems to be.

In Jonas's community, a child receives a professional assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, at which time s/he becomes an adult. Jonas, who has waited apprehensively to find out what his assignment will be, grows increasingly agitated during his long-awaited Ceremony. His friends have received desirable and appropriate assignments like "Fish Hatchery Attendant," and "Assistant Director of Recreation," but it appears that he, Jonas, has been bypassed. Finally, after all of the other Twelves have received their assignments, Jonas learns that he, because the elders recognize his intelligence and courage, and because he has the "Capacity to See Beyond" (the ability to see colors), has been selected to become the next Receiver of Memory.

The Horror of a Perfect World

When Jonas is selected to become the next Receiver of Memory, his life is instantaneously altered. He had prepared himself to be separated from his friends, but Jonas had no way of preparing for the loneliness and challenges of his unexpected new job. The Chief Elder warns him at the Ceremony of Twelve, in front of all his friends and family, that his training will involve pain. "Physical pain … of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience." Jonas's friends all know what they are to become and what will become of them. Jonas's heart, however, is "filled with fear"; the last Twelve appointed to be Receiver of Memory failed.

Jonas's foreboding deepens when he receives his first training instructions. He learns that he is no longer allowed to share his dreams with anyone, and that he may lie. Both rules go against everything he has been taught up until this point. It feels like his world has been turned upside down. The only person who understands his fears is the current Receiver of Memory, a "bearded man with pale eyes," who tells Jonas to call him the Giver. The Giver's job is to consult his memories of "the whole world" in order to advise the Committee of Elders when they must come to a decision. The Committee of Elders needs the Giver's guidance because they, not having any memories of the past, or of Elsewhere, cannot imagine a world other than it is, and therefore have trouble addressing "new" problems.

The Giver begins to transmit his memories to Jonas. He begins with pleasant memories of snow, sledding, sun, and sailing. Gradually, he adds memories of injuries, of war, of hate, of horrors. Jonas begins to feel irrational anger at his group mates, who are "satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrance his own was taking on." He is angry at himself, too, because "he could not change that [shallow living] for them." Suddenly Jonas's family, who tell each other their dreams and share their feelings every day, begin to seem shallow. None of them have any comprehension of what Jonas has been learning every day. "They have never known pain," Jonas thinks one night. The realization makes him feel "desperately lonely." When his mother says she feels sad, Jonas feels sadder because he "had experienced real grief," yet there is no "quick comfort" for how he feels, as there is for his mother's childish feelings. He begins to "lie easily" to his family about how pleasant his job is. In return, they smile and "lie easily," too. As Jonas begins to experience colors, and new sensations of both pain and pleasure, he grows more and more estranged from his community, and to feel increasingly disturbed. Who are his people, and how can they love if they lack depth of feelings and emotions and, even in a very fundamental way, choices?

Jonas's alienation from his community is complete when he witnesses, with the help of the Giver's closed-circuit television, his father "releasing" unwanted babies. Always before Jonas had assumed that babies who were released went "Elsewhere." It had never occurred to him that his father gave babies who were different (because they were twins, or because they, like his baby step-brother, Gabriel, were difficult to care for) a lethal injection. As one of two "enlightened" members of the community, Jonas now feels a terrible responsibility to right his community's wrongs. He decides to escape. He believes that, when he leaves, his memories will be transmitted to the other citizens; his community will, therefore, finally regain its links to the past.

Jonas's Escape

Jonas's plans to escape during the Ceremony of Twelve are foiled when he learns that his temporarily adopted brother, Gabriel, is in danger of being released. Motivated by his knowledge that release is a euphemism for death, Jonas steals his father's bicycle and, with Gabriel in tow, rides towards Elsewhere. Their journey is cold, dark, painful, and hungry. Jonas twists an ankle, has little to eat, and must do the best he can to care for the weakening Gabriel. His only comforts are the knowledge that all of his memories will be returned to the community, and his own memories of sunlight and warmth, which he shares with Gabriel.

Jonas finally comes to a sled on top of a hill, which he recognizes as the sled in his memory. He and Gabriel get onto the sled and sail toward Elsewhere. Writes Lowry,

The runners sliced through the snow and the wind whipped at his face as they sped in a straight line through an incision that seemed to lead to the final destination, the place that he had always felt was waiting, the Elsewhere that held their future and their past.

The novel's ending is ambiguous, but circular. Reunited with memories of light, snow, and sleds that the Giver gave him, reunited with memories of music, peace, joy, and freedom of choice that he found within himself, Jonas, along with Gabriel and the community that he left behind, has finally arrived in a better, more wholesome, place.

Characters

Andrei

As with all the characters, in the novel, Andrei is mentioned only by his first name. A contemporary of Jonas's father, he became an engineer and designed the bridge that crosses the river to the west of the community.

Asher

Asher is Jonas's best friend. He has a habit of mixing up his words; a habit which early chastisement with the Discipline Wand at the age of three did not eradicate. In one recollected scene, he asks for a "smack" instead of a "snack" and is repeatedly hit. This treatment caused him to stop talking altogether for a time, but essentially he remains an easygoing boy with a good sense of fun. At the ceremony of Assignment, he is made Assistant Director of Recreation, an occupation which everyone feels will be entirely appropriate for him. After Jonas has been assigned to The Giver, the two friends fall out, Asher not being able to understand Jonas's objections to a goodies-baddies game he has been playing with friends.

Benjamin

Benjamin is the same age as Asher and Jonas. For the past four years he has done his voluntary service after school in the Rehabilitation Center, where he has devised important new equipment.

Bruno

A very minor character. The brother of Fiona, a girl Jonas is especially fond of.

Caleb

Caleb is described as a replacement child. In Chapter 6 he is presented to a couple in place of their previous child, who had wandered off and fallen into the river. Fatal accidents, such as this, are rare in the Community. The choice of the same name for the replacement child is quite intentional. At the time of the original Caleb's loss, the entire community joined together in a slowly fading murmur of the drowned boy's name. Since then it has been used by no one. Then, at the naming ceremony of the new Caleb, the murmuring begins again, this time increasing in volume, "as if the first Caleb were returning."

Media Adaptations

• The Giver was produced in an unabridged audiotape version in 1995, published on dual cassette by Bantam Books-Audio.

Chief Elder

The Chief Elder, elected every eleven years, is the leader of the community, and responsible for

addressing the annual ceremonies, at the culmination of which the Assignments are announced. The Chief Elder announcing Jonas's Assignment is female.

Edna

Edna is an old person who has been recently "released." She had been a Birthmother, and then worked for years in Food Production, without forming a family unit.

Father

For most of the time the reader is entirely sympathetic towards Jonas's father. He works as a Nurturer, looking after very young children before their naming and allocation to family units. His concern for one baby boy, Gabriel, who is not progressing well, is touching, especially when he decides to bring the child home for several weeks in order to build up his body weight. This gesture is thoroughly approved by Jonas. But total disillusion with his father sets in, when Jonas discovers the truth about "release," and witnesses his father's casual, businesslike approach towards deciding the fate of a pair of twins, only one of whom is allowed to grow up in the Community.

Fiona

Fiona is in the same year-group as Jonas and Asher. She and Jonas are special friends and often cycle to places together. She does all her voluntary work in the House of the Old and is officially made a Caretaker of the Old at her twelfth Ceremony. As a Caretaker she becomes party to the true meaning of "release" but, unlike Jonas, accepts it as the way of the community.

Fritz

Fritz is a clumsy boy who lives next door to Jonas. He receives a new bicycle at the ceremony of Nine, in Chapter 6, and immediately bumps into the podium with it. Jonas and his parents fear that the new bike will "probably too often be dropped on the front walk instead of wheeled neatly into its port." Fritz is a minor character but is used to emphasize the community's obsession with order and conformity. Minor infringements, such as shoes on the wrong feet, become major transgressions in such a world.

Gabe

See Gabriel

Gabriel

One of the children being "nurtured" by Jonas's father is not putting on weight. The boy is in danger of being declared "inadequate" and hence being set aside for "release." The father's concern is genuine. He secretly discovers the name that has been allotted to the child (Number Thirty-six in his year group), and uses it prior to the naming ceremony, hoping it will help the little fellow's development. In Chapter 3 Jonas's father actually brings the baby home at night, together with the child's comfort object (a hippo), and later he successfully lobbies for "Gabe" to be granted an additional year of nurturing.

Gabriel is pale-eyed. Although Jonas is also pale-eyed, this is a rarity in the Community. There is a suggestion that the two of them may have shared the same birth-mother. Certainly a fraternal bond develops between them, especially after Jonas offers to let Gabriel sleep in his room, so that he can be the one to comfort him in the night, if necessary, his Mother and Father having become worn out.

On being transferred for a trial night back to the Nurturing Center, Gabriel cries inconsolably, and it is decided he shall, after all, be "released." This announcement, at a family evening meal, forces Jonas to bring forward his planned escape. He races away from the community on his Father's bike, with Gabriel in the child-seat on the back.

Giver

The Giver is fair-eyed, like Jonas, and like the previous Receiver, a girl called Rosemary. The Giver claims Rosemary as his daughter.

In her Newbery acceptance speech, Lowry talked about a painter she had met in 1979, while working on an article in a magazine. Something fascinated Lowry about the painter's face, especially his eyes. "Later I hear that he has become blind. I think about him—his name is Carl Nelson—from time to time. His photograph hangs over my desk. I wonder what it was like for him to lose the colors about which he was so impassioned. I wish, in a whimsical way, that he could have somehow magically given me the capacity to see the way he did." (Lowry's photograph of Carl Nelson was used on the front cover of the first American edition of the novel.)

The Giver, who describes himself as not as old as he looks, provides just such a magical transfer of powers. He has been made tired by the burden of knowledge and memories, the assimilation and storage of which have consumed his life. As soon as Jonas meets him (in Chapter 10), The Giver is at pains to point out that it is not the memory of nostalgia—not the recollections of childhood normally indulged in by the old—that he must transmit. "It's the memories of the whole world."

His apartment is book-lined, at first giving the impression that The Giver's knowledge is professorial, and that the relationship between him and Jonas will be one of sage and student. But this impression is quickly undermined when The Giver announces that he is going to transmit the memory of snow. This involves a ritualistic laying on of hands and an extra-sensory simulation of the sensation of cold.

After similar transmissions, both pleasurable and painful, The Giver concludes his education of Jonas in a very different fashion. He shows him a videotape recording of a "Release," and then, clearly having become opposed to the community himself, helps Jonas plan an escape.

Inger

Inger is described as "a nice girl, though some-what lazy, with a strong body." Number Two in Jonas's year, she is made a Birthmother.

Instructor

A minor, anonymous character, who receives Asher's apology for lateness in the opening chapter.

Isaac

Another minor character, only mentioned in the course of the Ceremony, in Chapter 7. He is made an Instructor of Sixes (children aged six), an Assignment which "obviously pleased him and was well-deserved."

Jonas

Jonas, the main character of the novel, unlike his friend Asher, is careful about language. He searches for the right words to describe his feelings. The opening of the book establishes him as aged eleven, apprehensive about the approaching December, when the annual Ceremony will be held, and Assignments will be given to all those in his year group.

He gets on reasonably well with his peers and has friends of both sexes (Asher and Fiona). But he feels different. Physically he has pale eyes, whereas nearly everybody else has brown eyes. Other eleven-year-olds are able to predict their likely Assignments, which are chosen on the basis of observed inclinations and aptitudes. Jonas has developed no special interest (he visits the House of the Old only to be with Fiona, who is dedicated to her work there) and has no idea what the Elders will consider him cut out to become—hence his apprehensiveness.

Apart from this, Jonas conforms well. He shares his family's distaste for Isaac, the clumsy and untidy boy who lives next door. Numbered Nineteen in his year group, Jonas has a long wait at the Ceremony, while the lower numbers receive their Assignments. All are given predictable and aptly chosen tasks in life. His nervousness mounts. The tension (both for Jonas and for the reader) becomes almost unbearable when the Chief Elder skips Jonas's number. His is the last Assignment to be announced. It is entirely unexpected, and hugely daunting. Jonas has been selected as the next Receiver of Memory.

As such he has to spend many hours every day in the company of an old man who is the current holder of Memories. The old man calls himself The Giver. In the course of their sessions, Jonas's eyes are opened to many things—initially wonderful, pleasurable things, then increasingly painful things. Eventually he sees that the Community is based on cruel falsehoods—none more cruel than the ceremony of Release, which turns out to be the application of a lethal injection. He watches a video of his father dispatching one of two twins in this way, and he and the Giver plan an escape.

The planned escape has to be put in motion prematurely, so that Jonas can save the young child, Gabriel. They flee the community together and in the final pages of the book struggle through harsh terrain and elements, finally sledding down a snowy slope towards twinkling, colored lights. The book ends with readers having to make up their own minds whether Jonas and Gabriel survive, and if so in what kind of environment.

Larissa

Larissa is one of the old people. Jonas helps to bathe her in Chapter 4. Later, in Chapter 14, the reader learns that Larissa, who had memorable sparkling eyes and a soft voice, has been "Released." Jonas, at this stage, does not know the truth about "Release" and imagines her in the pleasant land of Elsewhere.

Lily

Lily is Jonas's little sister, four years younger than him. She still has a comfort object—a stuffed elephant.

Madeline

Significant for being Number One in Jonas's year group and therefore the first to receive an Assignment. She is made a Fish Hatchery Attendant.

Mother

Jonas's Mother holds a prominent position at the Department of Justice and is depicted as being more concerned about her job than about raising children. Early in the book she is distracted with thoughts about a court case in which she might be required to release a repeat offender. Later in the book she is only too glad to let Jonas look after Gabriel at night so that she can be refreshed for work.

Natasha

A very minor character, mentioned by Lily in Chapter 3. Natasha does her voluntary hours at the Birthing Center.

Philippa

Philippa is the female child in Asher's family unit; in the community's terms, his sister. She has no other part to play in the story.

Pierre

Pierre is numbered Twenty, to Jonas's Nineteen. Jonas has never liked Pierre. He is "serious, not much fun, and a worrier and tattletale, too." After Jonas's number has been skipped, he does not even hear what Assignment Pierre is given.

Receiver

See Giver

Roberto

An old person who has played a prominent part in the life of the community. He has worked as an Instructor of Elevens; has served on the Planning Committee; and was responsible for the landscaping of the Central Plaza. Despite these services, his "release" passes without notice, and when the name "Roberto" is re-assigned there is no Murmur-of-Replacement ritual.

Rosemary

Rosemary was the last person selected to be Receiver of Memories, some ten years ago. After five weeks, distressed by the painful memories passed on by The Giver, she had gone to the Chief of Elders and requested Release (forbidden in Jonas's rules, but not in hers). On her demise, the five weeks' worth of memories had come back to the people, causing them much anguish. The outcome is remembered as a terrible failure.

In Chapter 20 The Giver tells Jonas, in a dramatic declaration, that Rosemary was his daughter. Whether he means this figuratively or literally is another matter readers will decide for themselves.

Speaker

The Speaker is the person who makes all public announcements to the Community. Every room in every building has a loudspeaker which remains permanently switched on so that such messages can be assured transmission. It is a mark of The Giver's stature that he is able to turn his loudspeaker on or off, as he wishes.

Tanya

Another eleven/twelve year old, she is amongst those playing the game of goodies and baddies with Asher.

Thea

Another female in Jonas's year group, briefly mentioned in Chapter 6.

Yoshiko

A friend of Jonas's father, given as an example of someone who was surprised but thrilled by her Assignment (Doctor).

Themes

Coming of Age

A key characteristic of the particular community Lowry has created is the annual ritual in December when each year group, en masse, is declared one year older and given commensurate privileges and/or responsibilities. At the age of three, all children begin participating in the daily routine of "dreamtelling"—the requirement that, at the breakfast table, they describe the dreams they have had the previous night. It is also the age at which, educationally, the correct use of language is inculcated, regardless of individual development or speech skills. (Asher, who has specific problems with what educationists now call "word retrieval," has a good deal of trouble with this regime.) Up to the age of six, children wear jackets which fasten at the back. When they become seven they are given a front-fastening costume, as a mark of increasing independence. At the age of eight their "comfort object" is taken away. They are given another new jacket, this time with pockets: to indicate that they are now considered responsible enough to look after small belongings. And they must begin doing voluntary service outside of school hours. At the age of nine, girls remove their hair ribbons, and all children receive their own bicycle. At ten both boys and girls have their hair ceremoniously cut, and at eleven boys are given long trousers and girls "new undergarments."

But by far the most important rite of passage, and the one Jonas is in a permanent state of anxiety about in the early part of the book, is connected with becoming Twelve. This is the last time children are actively involved in the annual ceremony. After twelve, age is not considered important. Twelve is the age at which childhood is left behind, and an individual's adult calling is decided. Jonas is anxious because he has no idea what that calling is to be. It will be decided by the Elders and announced by the Chief Elder at the Ceremony.

There are two more Rites of Passage unrelated to age. They relate to Sex and Death.

Sex

Procreation is a purely mechanical affair in the community. If a girl is selected at the age of twelve to become a "Birthmother," she will eventually spend three years at the Birthing Center, giving birth to three babies. The babies are not brought up by their natural mothers but allocated to volunteer parents. No details are given as to the practical means of fathering children, but it is most likely to be by artificial insemination, since all sexual longing is eradicated at puberty, at the first sign of erotic dreaming. Indeed, the main purpose of "dreamtelling" is revealed to be the monitoring of "Stirrings"—the term given to sexual desire. When Jonas confesses one morning to an erotic dream, he is immediately prescribed a daily pill to purge such stirrings. Later in the book, when he stops taking this pill, it is a sign to the reader of open rebellion.

Death

The community refers to Death, euphemistically, as Release. The young are allowed to take this literally, believing that those "Released" are simply choosing to leave the community and go "Elsewhere." Release is the final Rite of Passage. A ceremony is held, which includes a "telling of the life," a toast, an anthem, a good-bye speech from the individual to be released (where appropriate), some farewell speeches from those who know him or her, then a walk through the door to the Releasing Room.

Not only the old enter the Releasing Room. Any infants that do not thrive are also sent there, as are persistent transgressors against the community's petty codes. Jonas eventually sees a video recording of what happens in the Releasing Room and discovers that the room is the scene of sordid executions. Individuals are given a lethal injection and their bodies disposed of down a garbage chute. His father's jaunty participation in the execution of an infant twin is particularly shocking.

The horrible truth of what goes on behind the door of the Releasing Room underpins any of the positive constructs defenders of the community might wish to put forward. Its social cohesion, its emphasis on law and order, its insistence that children develop at the same pace—all these are dependent upon infanticide, enforced euthanasia, and a justice system which administers the death penalty without qualm.

Difference

The community's weather is unvarying. Regulated by "Climate Control," it is in an unfluctuating state of "Sameness," so that amongst the first memories passed on to Jonas by the Giver, are the memories of snow and sunshine. The grey, climatic "sameness" is an objective correlative of the community's strict regulation of difference and variety in all walks of life. The system of Assignments pays some regard to the temperamental and attitudinal differences between children. Observed through the early years of life, they are usually given an assignment that tallies with their chosen hobbies or interests. A child who likes to play with a construction set and does his volunteer hours on building sites, for example, is given the Assignment of Engineer. However, in effect, this makes children the victims of their early predilections. There is no recognition that individuals might develop different interests. Those first interests must become their life's work, to be pursued without change.

There are many other aspects of community life which enforce sameness—all family groups, for example, are allotted two children, one male and one female—but the fact that all individuals have crucial life-choices made for them (in particular, choice of career) is the most important.

Topics For Further Study

• A politician holding high office, after reading The Giver, decides that new laws should be passed outlawing cultish communities. These laws will also affect traditional communities, such as the Amish and the Bruderhof. As an attorney you are engaged by such communities to help defend their continuing existence. Prepare your defense.
• After collecting as many examples of attempts to build Utopia as you can find (these should include both practical attempts, and fictional representations), plot them on a world map and on a timeline to determine whether they tend to occur in clusters.
• You are a television documentary producer. You have been asked to produce an outline for a 60-minute program on the subject of euthanasia, or voluntary suicide. Your professional brief requires you to present a balance of opinion, but as an individual you have very definite views. In your outline, you must construct the hour-long program so that you will be able to defend it in terms of balance, but in such a way that the balance of opinion supports your own beliefs.
• A dramatization of The Giver is to be shown on prime-time TV. Advertisers seem reluctant to sign up for the commercial breaks. As the advertising sales executive for the TV company, identify the manufacturers and service providers who might be interested in purchasing ads. Also identify creative links that could be made with the movie and their products and services.
• You are a medical practitioner in the community of The Giver. You discover that the pills taken to eradicate sexual longing ("Stirrings") have serious, indeed fatal, side-effects in later life. The Elders receive your report. Write an account of the debate which follows.
• You are directing a movie version of The Giver. Tomorrow you will be filming the Ceremony, closely following the description in Chapters 6 and 7. How will you plan the camera-shot sequence for each stage of the Ceremony?

Individual vs. Society

Superficially, the community is easy going about some of its rules and does allow individuals a degree of free choice. Most children do not wait till nine before they ride a bicycle. They borrow bikes from other children. Jonas's parents are allowed to bend the rules in order to take a third child into the house. But these are small matters compared with the fundamental loss of individual freedom represented by the announcement of Assignments. And in other small matters there are highly ritualized and formulaic expectations of behavior which support the will of the whole group as opposed to the individual. A child late for school makes an apology, and there is an immediate group response, "We accept your apology."

At any one moment individuals must be prepared to respond to announcements made through the ubiquitous loudspeakers. A day's holiday is proclaimed and everyone takes a rest from work. There is no opportunity for planning an individual vacation. There is nowhere to go; not much else to do. The community can only be successful in curtailing individual freedom by severely limiting the choices available to individuals. Hence, the community is paranoid in its insularity. Hence, the panic at the beginning of the novel, when an unidentified plane flies overhead.

The only character allowed any degree of personal freedom is The Giver. The power of his individuality is symbolized by the casual way in which he feels free to switch off the loudspeaker so that he cannot hear public announcements. This greatly impresses Jonas.

Style

Point of View

The book is written in the third person ("he/she"), but the narrative point of view is that of the main character, Jonas. From the first to final paragraph of the novel, the reader is always inside the head of Jonas, feeling with him the anxious moments leading up to the announcement of his Assignment, and feeling with him both the pleasurable and the painful memories passed on by The Giver.

Structure

The novel's structure is uncomplicated. The story is told in twenty-three, relatively short chapters, which describe a chronological narrative. The book is not divided into parts, but if it were there would be three.

Chapters 1 through 8 describe the events leading up to Jonas's selection as the next Receiver of Memories. These first eight chapters establish Jonas as a quiet boy who indulges in a fair amount of self-reflection. He is an easy character for the reader to identify with. The early chapters also establish the key attributes of the community and its social order. The piecemeal delivery of this information is important, because it allows the reader to begin reading the novel willing to give the community the benefit of the doubt, and therefore to share in Jonas's sense of disillusion when he later discovers some harsh truths. The time-scale of this section is quite condensed. The ceremony takes place in December, and Chapter 1 begins with the words "It was almost December."

Chapters 9 through 20 describe Jonas's apprenticeship to The Giver. The passing-on of memories amounts to an education of the sensibilities. It is not an education which others in the community have enjoyed, and this means that Jonas's "childhood, his friendships, his carefree sense of security—all of these things seemed to be slipping away." Gradually he realizes just what the community has sacrificed in order to enjoy the placid, well-ordered way of life it has chosen for itself. This realization takes place over a number of visits to The Giver, culminating in an overnight stay in Chapter 20, following Jonas's discovery of what goes on in the Releasing Room. The time-scale of these chapters is looser than the earlier part of the book. In Chapter 16 we are told that almost a yearhas passed since Jonas became twelve.

Chapters 21 through 23 cover Jonas's flight from the community. Especially as exhaustion sets in, the narrative in these final chapters of the book becomes more impressionistic and less explicitly descriptive, so that the reader is unsure how far Jonas has travelled. The two fugitives' final sledride is described in such a way as to leave the ending of the book open, so that different readers can interpret it in their own way. It is almost as if Lowry wants to allow the reader freedom of choice at this crucial point in her story, in order to emphasize one of the key themes of the novel.

Allegory

There are not many highly-accomplished allegorical novels written for children. The Giver is one. Clearly the community in the novel is representative of all groups that try and close themselves off from the influences of the wider world. In particular it shares many of the social attributes found amongst Anabaptist or Amish communities: emphases on codes of dress, rites of passage, the subservience of the individual to the will of the group. But it would be wrong to read the novel simply as a critique of such communities. There is, for example, a more general allegorical message in the expectations of a pedagogy that expects all children to accomplish the same goals at the same age. And there is an even stronger allegorical message for any society contemplating euthanasia as a means of reducing the burden of caring for the old and infirm.

The novel is also an allegory about systems of arcane knowledge, and as such appears to be critical of Gnosticism (the idea that the deeper truths about our world are best reserved for a few, chosen minds—passed on to the few, but kept from the many). The relationship between The Giver and Jonas is redolent of that between sage and disciple.

Resolution

The exact fate of Jonas and Gabriel might be uncertain at the end of the book (although Lowry's choice of name for the baby boy would seem to load the argument in favor of an optimistic interpretation). Is the vision of lights at the bottom of the hill and the sound of voices singing a true apprehension, or a sign that Jonas is sinking into unconsciousness? In a sense, it does not matter how the reader decides to interpret the final paragraphs, the real resolution of the novel having occurred in Chapter 20, when the decision to escape was made, with all the consequences that this will have for the community. The memories of how life used to be, kept for safekeeping (quite why is never satisfactorily explained) by The Giver, will be released with Jonas's going amongst the community. Life there will never be the same again. That nasty world has been undone.

Historical Context

Bosnia

Lowry's novel was written against the backdrop of events in Bosnia, and in particular the ugly results of "ethnic cleansing." During the early 1990s, Serbian forces in Bosnia opened concentration camps and attempted to rid the country of Muslims. Muslim women were raped and Muslim men incarcerated and starved, all as a matter of social and political policy. These practices were made known to the world by investigative journalism. The community in Lowry's novel is similarly concerned to keep outsiders at bay. There is only a way out of the community, no way in.

Euthanasia

While writing her novel, Lowry will have been aware of a celebrated euthanasia case in 1990, involving Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian had once proposed rendering death row prison inmates unconscious so that their living bodies could be used as the subjects of medical experiments. The suggestion had led to his dismissal, but he continued his preoccupation with euthanasia by writing on the subject for European medical journals. In an issue of Medicine and Law, he suggested setting up suicide clinics, arguing that the acceptance of planned death required the establishment of well-staffed and well-organized medical clinics where terminally ill patients can opt for death under controlled circumstances of compassion and decorum. In the late 1980s, he developed a suicide device that was basically a method of administering a lethal injection. In the novel, the Releasing Room, and the crude means of administering Release, bear all the hallmarks of Kevorkian's suicide device.

Kevorkian appeared on the Donahue talk show in April, 1990. A woman who had been diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's disease saw the show and got into contact with him. An English professor, she found the prospect of deteriorating mental faculties impossible to bear. Both she and her husband had been long-standing members of the Hemlock Society, which supports doctorassisted suicide. On June 4, 1990, using Kevorkian's suicide machine, she terminated her own life.

Although attempts to punish Kevorkian with the law on this and subsequent occasions failed, the moral outcry was vociferous. Condoning suicide paves the way for society to abdicate its responsibility for improving conditions for the elderly and chronically ill, many argued. However, the woman's family and friends insisted that she was competent to make her decision and had every right to do so. They defended the doctor's part in her death. This particular case, and others Kevorkian has been associated with since then, have dramatized the issue of the right to die in a way that has demanded full media attention. Lowry's children's novel might well be advocated reading for any adult anxious to consider the full implications of doctorassisted suicide.

Branch Davidian Raid

Early in 1993 the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was raided by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), after neighbors of the religious group complained of hearing machine-gun fire and a United Parcel Service employee reported delivering two cases of hand grenades and black gunpowder. The Branch Davidians were an offshoot of the Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists, a splinter group of the Seventh-Day Adventists.

David Koresh had joined the group in 1984 and immediately began a campaign to gain control. Under Koresh, the religious sect became a fullfledged cult. He incorporated a strict regime for the

group, but excluded himself from his own discipline. After the first abortive raid by the ATF, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) swarmed the compound, hoping that cult members would surrender themselves voluntarily. Weeks of negotiations followed before the FBI asked Attorney General Janet Reno to authorize another raid on the compound.

The raid commenced at 12:05 p.m. Smoke was seen coming from the compound. Fire trucks were called, but they did not arrive for thirty minutes. By that time, most of the building had already collapsed. Eighty-six people perished in the fire, including seventeen children and Koresh himself. Only nine people survived.

Koresh was representative of individuals who cast a mesmerizing spell and gain supreme control of a sect. The community in Lowry's novel is a much more substantial body of people than this, and should not be referred to as a cult (Lowry herself does not use this word in the novel) any more than the Anabaptists or the Amish are cults. In this regard, although the events of the Branch Davidian Raid were closely contemporary with the book's publication, they are not particularly relevant to the themes of the novel.

Critical Overview

Despite its differences from Lowry's other work, The Giver was universally well-received on publication. Gary D. Schmidt, writing in The Five Owls, stated: "This is a fantasy novel that does what fantasy at its best can do: make us see the reality all the more clearly. The questions it asks about the costs of love, the structure of the family, the role of painful memories, the nature of the perfect society are all timely." In a much longer, but equally enthusiastic review of "this intricately constructed masterwork," Patty Campbell, writing for Horn Book, began by drawing attention to the departure from Lowry's usual style. "Up until now, much of Lowry's work has consisted of [what one reviewer called] 'contemporary novels with engaging characters that explore something very rare—a functional family.' But The Giver is a dystopia, 'driven by plot and philosophy—not by character and dialogue,' and the picture of the functional family turns disturbingly awry as the story proceeds." Campbell takes advantage of the space allowed for an extended review to delineate what she sees as the exceptional advance in narrative skill shown in the novel. The opening of the novel, she argues, shows a mastery of "innuendo, foreshadowing, and resonance." Quoting the opening sentence, Campbell goes on to explain: "The word December is loaded with resonance: the darkness of the solstice, endings, Christmas, cold…. The name Jonas, too, is evocative—of the biblical Jonah, he who is sent by God to cry against the wickedness of Nineveh, an unwilling lone messenger with a mission that will be received with hostility. In one seemingly simple sentence Lowry sets the mood and direction of her story, foreshadows its outcome, and plants an irresistible narrative pull."

Proceeding to compare the novel with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Campbell then analyzed the skill with which Lowry slowly reveals the unpleasant edifice upon which the initially appealing community is based, before admiring the ingenuity of the novelist's handling of the denouement. Amongst a minority of reviews to question certain aspects of the novel, Jane Inglis, writing in School Librarian, wondered whether able readers might be frustrated "by the strict limits imposed by the author on her creative imagination." Inglis went on to recommend Lowry's book as "an admirable early venture into fictional dystopias, with lots of follow-up material available for the reader who craves for more." However, the review was out of kilter with the judgement of Campbell and others that Lowry's novel, though a children's book, deserved to be considered along-side the very best books written on a similar theme.

Lowry's Newbery acceptance speech identified the creative source of the book as memories bubbling up like springs and mountain streams, "each tributary bringing with it the collected bits and pieces from the past, from the distant, from the countless Elsewheres: all of it moving, mingled, in the current." She remembered living in an American enclave, situated in the centre of Tokyo, cocooned from the Japanese way of life. She remembered the way in which, at college, a fellow student had been ostracized simply for being different. There had been no teasing or unpleasantness. "We do something worse: we ignore her. We pretend that she doesn't exist. In a small house of fourteen young women, we make one invisible." She remembered meeting a painter, Carl Nelson, who later became blind. "I wonder what it was like for him to lose the colors about which he was so impassioned." In summarizing what these and other memories represented, Lowry has been her own most revealing critic. "I've never been a writer of fairy tales. And if I've learned anything through that river of memories, it is that we can't live in a walled world, in an 'only us, only now' world, where we are all the same and feel safe. We would have to sacrifice too much. The richness of color would disappear. Feelings for other human beings would no longer be necessary. Choice would be obsolete."

Criticism

Elyse Lord

Elyse Lord is a visiting instructor at the University of Utah and at the Salt Lake City Community College. In the following essay, she evaluates controversial themes in The Giver and concludes that Lowry's novel, while terrifying in many ways, offers its readers hope and a constructive view of Jonas's world.

Critics respond to Lois Lowry's novel, The Giver, with nearly universal praise. The book has received more than ten prestigious awards, including the highly coveted Newbery Medal, which the American Library Association awarded it in 1994. (The ALA awards the Newbery Medal to the best book published in the United States for children or young adults in the preceding year.)

One reason for the novel's nearly unprecedented acclaim is that its storyline captures the interest of a wide group of readers and critics. For example, many scholars consider the novel to be dystopian (about a miserable society), and compare it favorably to adult classics like Brave New World (1933), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and 1984 (1940) as well as to children's classics like White Mountains (1967) and A Wrinkle in Time (1962). Other scholars, like Patty Campbell, praise the novel for capturing the moral imaginations of its readers. Campbell lauds the novel for taking "hardened young-adult reviewers by surprise." The novel, she says, is so "rich in levels of meaning, so daring in complexity of symbol and metaphor, so challenging in the ambiguity of its conclusion, that we are left with all of our neat little everyday categories and judgments hanging useless."

While critics', librarians', educators', and students' responses to the novel seem like veritable fanfare, the novel has nevertheless become the center of a spirited censorship debate. To the surprise and indignation of many of the novels' enthusiasts, The Giver, according to a report by the People for the American Way, was the second most frequently challenged book in 1996. Parents in cities as geographically dispersed as Las Vegas, Nevada, Columbia Falls, Montana, Palm Springs, California, and Brecksville, Ohio, have protested use of the novel in public schools because it contains adult themes like infanticide (baby killing) and euthanasia (mercy deaths). In one particularly controversial scene, Jonas, the protagonist in the novel, watches as his father carefully directs a needle "into the top of newchild's forehead, puncturing the place where the fragile skin pulsed." His father says cheerfully, "I know, I know. It hurts, little guy. But I have to use a vein, and the veins in your arms are still too teeny-weeny." Jonas's father pushes in the plunger, then says, "All done," and sends the small corpse down a trash chute. Would-be censors object to the scene because it is so graphic, and because it transforms Jonas's once beloved father into a cold-blooded murderer.

The irony of censorship attacks on the novel is that The Giver dramatizes the plight of an individual living in a society that censors its peoples' language, emotions, and behaviors. This irony is compounded by the fact that most who would like to see The Giver censored confess that they have never read the novel in its entirety. However, would-be censors raise important questions, not just about Lowry's novel, but about all novels for youth. For example, parent Anna Cerbasi of Port Saint Lucie, Florida, who asked school board members to remove the novel from middle-school shelves, objected to the book because "Nobody is a family. They kill the baby who cries at night. I read it and thought—no way. Not for sixth grade. Maybe high school, maybe." Ms. Cerbasi's concerns about the novel raise legitimate questions about who should decide which books are appropriate for which children, and whether or not disturbing stories are appropriate for youth even if they teach a valuable lesson.

However, these large questions cannot be answered on the basis of one book. In fact, a surprising number of books written for youth contain graphic and disturbing materials. It seems likely that Lowry's novel has been more controversial than most, not because it is any more "dangerous" than other books, but because it has been so widely integrated into school curricula and has therefore caught more parents' attention than less accessible books. Given the size of the question—how can one evaluate whether or not terrifying materials are appropriate for a youthful reader—it is most realistic to respond to would-be censors' concerns by presenting a constructive reading of The Giver, a reading which is consistent with educators' efforts to discuss controversial scenes in sensitive and responsible ways.

What Do I Read Next?

• Anastasia Krupnik, the first in Lowry's sequence of novels about a "crackle-brained, fizzle-headed, freckle-faced dynamo." The atmosphere in this novel could not be more different from The Giver. Can you identify any connections?
• One reviewer of The Giver compared it with Margaret Atwood's adult novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a dystopia in which women's roles are limited to either wife or bearer of children.
• There were several attempts to set up Utopian communities in the nineteenth century. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) is based on personal experience of one such enterprise.
• Any futuristic tale must expect to be compared with George Orwell's 1949 classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• The Republic, a description of Plato's celebrated political Utopia, was written in the 4th century B.C.

Critics and censors all agree that Jonas's situation in The Giver is horrifying. Through a series of shocking events, he discovers that "release" is actually murder, that his people literally have limited vision (they can only see in black and white, so do not notice racial differences, or colors of any kind), and that his people have no way to think for themselves, or to make decisions without the Giver's help. (They have no memories of pain and pleasure, and they are sedated so as not to feel the "stirrings" of their own desire.) Jonas is understandably concerned by these discoveries, especially when he learns that his step-brother Gabriel is going to be "released" (killed) because he cries during the night. Jonas knows that he must save Gabriel, and he knows that he must do something to help his community to respond more creatively to the inevitable (and sometimes painful) variation of the human species.

Jonas's despair is, at this point, so profound that readers may fear he will be overcome by it. However, he does overcome his despair, and this is why the book is so important—and appropriate—for young people to read. Lowry has equipped Jonas with the qualities he will need to rise above his difficult circumstances. She has given him the ability to see color, the ability to grapple with imperceptible ideas (like memories and colors), and faith in his own ability to act morally. She has made Jonas's perceptual abilities a condition for him to act heroically in this story. Through Jonas, Lowry argues for the preservation of a kind of creative vision, a vision which every community needs if it is to benefit from its citizens' differences and input.

More specifically, Jonas is a hero worth emulating because, throughout the novel, he develops and refines his unusual ability to perceive and to understand ideas that are outside of his frame of reference. One day, for example, Jonas notices a "change" in an apple. When he tries to define this change, by observing the apple under a magnifying glass, he fails. The magnifying glass doesn't help him because what Jonas needs is "a new way of looking" at things in order to apprehend color; a magnifying glass does not allow him to apprehend what is new and different. Here Lowry is suggesting that the vision of an artistic boy, who is open to ideas that exist outside of current paradigms of thought, is of the utmost importance to a society that has lost the ability to perceive differences. Similarly, when Jonas admits to the community that he believes he has the capacity to "see beyond," the crowd begins to collectively murmur his name. Ironically, the community, which, as The Giver points out, has "never completely mastered Sameness," selects Jonas to help lead them because of his ability to perceive differences. Jonas's vision is all the more valuable because it is in such short supply. Lowry is arguing for the preservation of a particular way of looking at the world that is essential to the survival of the human(e) race.

Further evidence of the importance of Jonas's unique perceptual abilities comes when he discovers that his community's goodness is a sham. Had Jonas simply rejected his community (as a "lesser" character might have done), the novel would not have carried the same positive psychological impact. Jonas does initially feel contempt for his community, but he quickly develops the insights he needs to channel his anger into constructive actions. For example, he sarcastically mimics his peoples' obedience.

I will take care of that, sir. I will take care of that, sir…. I will do whatever you like, sir. I will kill peo ple, sir. Old people? Small newborn people? I'd be happy to kill them, sir. Thank you for your instructions, sir.

But the Giver tells Jonas that "They can't help it. They know nothing." Jonas struggles to understand his community, and comes to recognize that it is made up of learned, civilized people, who have no awareness of their origins and very little knowledge of how rules are made. Jonas's people cannot perceive differences; they do not adapt well to change. And so they are simple, shallow, and murderous.

Yes, Lowry's novel is terrifying, but it is not irresponsible in its handling of sensitive materials. In fact, Lowry seems to be dramatizing a modern view of healing, as described by Louise Kaplan in her book No Voice is Ever Wholly Lost. After working with holocaust victims and their families, Kaplan concluded that, even though many holocaust survivors have never verbally shared their experiences with their children, their children feel compelled to physically reenact their parents' trauma (by developing anorexia, for example). The bodies and subconscious minds of holocaust survivors' children understand—without words—the nature of their parents' unwitnessable suffering. The only release for these children is to hear their parents' stories. This "truth telling" frees children from the compulsions they feel to "enact and concretize" their parents' unspeakable and painful pasts.

Kaplan's observations of how parents unknowingly transmit traumas to their children support a reading of Lowry's novel as powerful and positive. Jonas has been selected to receive memories because his community members prefer the comfort of virtually pain-free and comfortable living. However, Jonas discovers that if he leaves—or dies—his memories will be released and transmitted back to the community. Jonas chooses to give the community back its memories. If Kaplan's theory is right (and according to the logic of Lowry's story), the community needs its memories in order to heal itself; if members acknowledge both their pain and their joy, as well as the depths of their emotions, Jonas will be "released" (not killed) from the huge burden of serving as the Keeper of Memory.

Lowry's ending, though ambiguous, lends support to the idea that the novel embraces "wholeness" as a healing principle. In the end, Jonas, who has run away from home with Gabriel in tow, discovers a place that he remembers. He finds a sled that he remembers, mounts it, and its runners slice through the snow and take him towards "Else-where," the place that holds his and Gabriel's "future and …past." Jonas then hears music for the first time. He is able to hear the music, to recognize the music, because he has relinquished others' memories, and in so doing has opened the door to his own perceptions. It is now possible for his new thoughts and feelings to join with his old thoughts and feelings. Lowry foreshadows this perplexing but hopeful ending when she describes Jonas as Keeper of the "memories of the whole world." Her message, finally, is that one cannot ignore uncomfortable memories; one must embrace a "whole" vision, which contains joy as well as pain, if one (or one's children) is/are ever to feel "at home" in the world.

Though Lowry has consistently declined to interpret The Giver's ending, she has revealed that she is pleased by young readers who have perceived "the magic of the circular journey," and "the truth that we go out and come back, and that what we come back to is changed, and so are we."

Lowry's novel is compelling, terrifying, and above all, hopeful. Through reading about Jonas, a boy who has the courage and vision to help his people to acknowledge their pain and differences, Lowry's readers can experience the joy of pushing "open the gate" [Lowry's metaphor] that separates them from Elsewhere. It would be hard to find a more appropriate message for youth, who are immersed in making important decisions about what kinds of people they will one day become.

Source: Elyse Lord, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.

Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry explains the origins of The Giver in this excerpt, taken from her 1993 Newbery Medal acceptance speech, given at the annual meeting of the American Library Association on June 26, 1994, in Miami, Florida.

"How do you know where to start?" a child asked me once, in a schoolroom where I'd been speaking to her class about the writing of books. I shrugged and smiled and told her that I just start wherever it feels right.

This evening it feels right to start by quoting a passage from The Giver a scene set during the days in which the boy, Jonas, is beginning to look more deeply into the life that has been very superficial, beginning to see that his own past goes back further than he had ever known and has greater implications than he had ever suspected.

Now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow-moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going.

Every author is asked again and again the question we probably each have come to dread the most: How did you get this idea?

We give glib, quick answers because there are other hands raised, other kids in the audience waiting.

I'd like, tonight, to dispense with my usual flippancy and glibness and try to tell you the origins of this book. It is a little like Jonas looking into the river and realizing that it carries with it everything that has come from an Elsewhere. A spring, perhaps, at the beginning, bubbling up from the earth; then a trickle from a glacier; a mountain stream entering farther along; and each tributary bringing with it the collected bits and pieces from the past, from the distant, from the countless Elsewheres: all of it moving, mingled, in the current.

For me, the tributaries are memories, and I've selected only a few. I'll tell them to you chronologically. I have to go way back. I'm starting fortysix years ago.

In 1948 I am eleven years old. I have gone with my mother, sister, and brother to join my father, who has been in Tokyo for two years and will be there for several more.

We live there, in the center of that huge Japanese city, in a small American enclave with a very American name: Washington Heights. We live in an American-style house, with American neighbors, and our little community has its own movie theater, which shows American movies, and a small church, a tiny library, and an elementary school; and in many ways it is an odd replica of a United States village.

(In later, adult years I was to ask my mother why we had lived there instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to live within the Japanese community and to learn and experience a different way of life. But she seemed surprised by my question. She said that we lived where we did because it was comfortable. It was familiar. It was safe.)

At eleven years old I am not a particularly adventurous child, nor am I a rebellious one. But I have always been curious.

I have a bicycle. Again and again—countless times—without my parents' knowledge, I ride my bicycle out the back gate of the fence that surrounds our comfortable, familiar, safe American community. I ride down a hill because I am curious, and I enter, riding down that hill, an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable, perhaps even unsafe—though I never feel it to be—area of Tokyo that throbs with life.

It is a district called Shibuya. It is crowded with shops and people and theaters and street vendors and the day-to-day bustle of Japanese life.

I remember, still, after all these years, the smells: fish and fertilizer and charcoal; the sounds: music and shouting and the clatter of wooden shoes and wooden sticks and wooden wheels; and the colors: I remember the babies and toddlers dressed in bright pink and orange and red, most of all; but I remember, too, the dark blue uniforms of the schoolchildren—the strangers who are my own age.

I wander through Shibuya day after day during those years when I am eleven, twelve, and thirteen. I love the feel of it, the vigor and the garish brightness and the noise: all such a contrast to my own life.

But I never talk to anyone. I am not frightened of the people, who are so different from me, but I am shy. I watch the children shouting and playing around a school, and they are children my age, and they watch me in return; but we never speak to one another.

One afternoon I am standing on a street corner when a woman near me reaches out, touches my hair, and says something. I back away, startled, because my knowledge of the language is poor and I misunderstand her words. I think she has said "kirai-desu, " meaning that she dislikes me; and I am embarrassed, and confused, wondering what I have done wrong: how I have disgraced myself.

Then, after a moment, I realize my mistake. She has said, actually, "kirei-desu. " She has called me pretty. And I look for her, in the crowd, at least to smile, perhaps to say thank you if I can overcome my shyness enough to speak. But she is gone.

I remember this moment—this instant of communication gone awry—again and again over the years. Perhaps this is where the river starts.

In 1954 and 1955 I am a college freshman, living in a very small dormitory, actually a converted private home, with a group of perhaps fourteen other girls. We are very much alike. We wear the same sort of clothes: cashmere sweaters and plaid wool skirts, knee socks and loafers. We all smoke Marlboro cigarettes, and we knit—usually argyle socks for our boyfriends—and play bridge. Sometimes we study; and we get good grades because we are all the cream of the crop, the valedictorians and class presidents from our high schools all over the United States.

One of the girls in our dorm is not like the rest of us. She doesn't wear our uniform. She wears blue jeans instead of skirts, and she doesn't curl her hair or knit or play bridge. She doesn't date or go to fraternity parties and dances.

She's a smart girl, a good student, a pleasant enough person, but she is different, somehow alien, and that makes us uncomfortable. We react with a kind of mindless cruelty. We don't tease or torment her, but we do something worse: we ignore her. We pretend that she doesn't exist. In a small house of fourteen young women, we make one invisible.

Somehow, by shutting her out, we make ourselves feel comfortable. Familiar. Safe.

I think of her now and then as the years pass. Those thoughts—fleeting, but profoundly remorseful—enter the current of the river.

In the summer of 1979, I am sent by a magazine I am working for to an island off the coast of Maine to write an article about a painter who lives there alone. I spend a good deal of time with this man, and we talk a lot about color. It is clear to me that although I am a highly visual person—a person who sees and appreciates form and composition and color—this man's capacity for seeing color goes far beyond mine.

I photograph him while I am there, and I keep a copy of his photograph for myself because there is something about his face—his eyes—which haunts me.

Later I hear that he has become blind.

I think about him—his name is Carl Nelson—from time to time. His photograph hangs over my desk. I wonder what it was like for him to lose the colors about which he was so impassioned.

I wish, in a whimsical way, that he could have somehow magically given me the capacity to see the way he did.

A little bubble begins, a little spurt, which will trickle into the river.

In 1989 I go to a small village in Germany to attend the wedding of one of my sons. In an ancient church, he marries his Margret in a ceremony conducted in a language I do not speak and cannot understand.

But one section of the service is in English. A woman stands in the balcony of that old stone church and sings the words from the Bible: Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people.

How small the world has become, I think, looking around the church at the many people who sit there wishing happiness to my son and his new wife, wishing it in their own language as I am wishing it in mine. We are all each other's people now, I find myself thinking.

Can you feel that this memory is a stream that is now entering the river?

Another fragment. My father, nearing ninety, is in a nursing home. My brother and I have hung family pictures on the walls of his room. During a visit, he and I are talking about the people in the pictures. One is my sister, my parents' first child, who died young of cancer. My father smiles, looking at her picture. "That's your sister," he says happily. "That's Helen."

Then he comments, a little puzzled, but not at all sad, "I can't remember exactly what happened to her."

We can forget pain, I thought. And it is comfortable to do so.

But I also wonder briefly: is it safe to do that, to forget?

That uncertainty pours itself into the river of thought which will become the book.

1991. I am in an auditorium somewhere. I have spoken at length about my book Number the Stars, which has been honored with the 1990 Newbery Medal. A woman raises her hand. When the time for her question comes, she sighs very loudly, and says, "Why do we have to tell this Holocaust thing over and over? Is it really necessary?"

I answer her as well as I can, quoting, in fact, my German daughter-in-law, who has said to me, "No one knows better than we Germans that we must tell this again and again."

But I think about her question—and my answer—a great deal.

Wouldn't it, I think, playing devil's advocate to myself, make for a more comfortable world to forget the Holocaust? And I remember once again how comfortable, familiar, and safe my parents had sought to make my childhood by shielding me from Elsewhere. But I remember, too, that my response had been to open the gate again and again. My instinct had been a child's attempt to see for myself what lay beyond the wall.

The thinking becomes another tributary into the river of thought that will create The Giver.

Here's another memory. I am sitting in a booth with my daughter in a little Beacon Hill pub where she and I often have lunch together. The television is on in the background, behind the bar, as it always is. She and I are talking. Suddenly I gesture to her. I say, "Shhh," because I have heard a fragment of the news and I am startled, anxious, and want to hear the rest.

Someone has walked into a fast-food place with an automatic weapon and randomly killed a number of people. My daughter stops talking and waits while I listen to the rest.

Then I relax. I say to her, in a relieved voice, "It's all right. It was in Oklahoma." (Or perhaps it was Alabama. Or Indiana.)

She stares at me in amazement that I have said such a hideous thing.

How comfortable I made myself feel for a moment, by reducing my own realm of caring to my own familiar neighborhood. How safe I deluded myself into feeling.

I think about that, and it becomes a torrent that enters the flow of a river turbulent by now, and clogged with memories and thoughts and ideas that begin to mesh and intertwine. The river begins to seek a place to spill over.

When Jonas meets The Giver for the first time, and tries to comprehend what lies before him, he says, in confusion, "I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now."

In beginning to write The Giver I created, as I always do, in every book, a world that existed only in my imagination—the world of "only us, only now." I tried to make Jonas's world seem familiar, comfortable, and safe, and I tried to seduce the reader. I seduced myself along the way. It did feel good, that world. I got rid of all the things I fear and dislike: all the violence, prejudice, poverty, and injustice; and I even threw in good manners as a way of life because I liked the idea of it.

One child has pointed out, in a letter, that the people in Jonas's world didn't even have to do dishes.

It was very, very tempting to leave it at that.

But I've never been a writer of fairy tales. And if I've learned anything through that river of memories, it is that we can't live in a walled world, in an "only us, only now" world, where we are all the same and feel safe. We would have to sacrifice too much. The richness of color would disappear. Feelings for other humans would no longer be necessary. Choice would be obsolete.

And besides, I had ridden my bike Elsewhere as a child, and liked it there, but had never been brave enough to tell anyone about it. So it was time.

A letter that I've kept for a very long time is from a child who has read my book Anastasia Krupnik. Her letter—she's a little girl named Paula from Louisville, Kentucky—says:

"I really like the book you wrote about Anastasia and her family because it made me laugh every time I read it. I especially liked when it said she didn't want to have a baby brother in the house because she had to clean up after him every time and change his diaper when her mother and father aren't home and she doesn't like to give him a bath and watch him all the time and put him to sleep every night while her mother goes to work … "

Here's the fascinating thing: Nothing that the child describes actually happens in the book. The child—as we all do—has brought her own life to a book. She has found a place, a place in the pages of a book, that shares her own frustrations and feelings.

And the same thing is happening—as I hoped it would happen—with The Giver.

Those of you who hoped that I would stand here tonight and reveal the "true" ending, the "right" interpretation of the ending, will be disappointed. There isn't one. There's a right one for each of us, and it depends on our own beliefs, our own hopes.

Let me tell you a few endings which are the right endings for a few children out of the many who have written to me.

From a sixth grader: "I think that when they were traveling they were traveling in a circle. When they came to 'Elsewhere' it was their old community, but they had accepted the memories and all the feelings that go along with it."

From another: "Jonas was kind of like Jesus because he took the pain for everyone else in the community so they wouldn't have to suffer. And, at the very end of the book, when Jonas and Gabe reached the place that they knew as Elsewhere, you described Elsewhere as if it were Heaven."

And one more: "A lot of people I know would hate that ending, but not me. I loved it. Mainly because I got to make the book happy. I decided they made it. They made it to the past. I decided the past was our world, and the future was their world. It was parallel worlds."

Finally, from one seventh-grade boy: "I was really surprised that they just died at the end. That was a bummer. You could of made them stay alive, I thought."

Very few find it a bummer. Most of the young readers who have written to me have perceived the magic of the circular journey. The truth that we go out and come back, and that what we come back to is changed, and so are we. Perhaps I have been traveling in a circle, too. Things come together and become complete.

Here is what I've come back to:

The daughter who was with me and looked at me in horror the day I fell victim to thinking we were "only us, only now" (and that what happened in Oklahoma, or Alabama, or Indiana didn't matter) was the first person to read the manuscript of The Giver.

The college classmate who was "different" lives, last I heard, very happily in New Jersey with another woman who shares her life. I can only hope that she has forgiven those of us who were young in a more frightened and less enlightened time.

My son, and Margret, his German wife—the one who reminded me how important it is to tell our stories again and again, painful though they often are—now have a little girl who will be the receiver of all of their memories. Their daughter had crossed the Atlantic three times before she was six months old. Presumably my granddaughter will never be fearful of Elsewhere.

Carl Nelson, the man who lost colors but not the memory of them, is the face on the cover of the book. He died in 1989 but left a vibrant legacy of paintings. One hangs now in my home.

And I am especially happy to stand here tonight on this platform with Allen Say because it truly brings my journey full circle. Allen was twelve years old when I was. He lived in Shibuya, that alien Elsewhere that I went to as a child on a bicycle. He was one of the Other, the Different, the dark-eyed children in blue school uniforms, and I was too timid then to do more than stand at the edge of their schoolyard, smile shyly, and wonder what their lives were like.

Now I can say to Allen what I wish I could have said then: Watashi-no tomodachi desu. Greetings, my friend.

I have been asked whether the Newbery Medal is, actually, an odd sort of burden in terms of the greater responsibility one feels. Whether one is paralyzed by it, fearful of being able to live up to the standards it represents.

For me the opposite has been true. I think the 1990 Newbery freed me to risk failure.

Other people took that risk with me, of course. One was my editor, Walter Lorraine, who has never to my knowledge been afraid to take a chance. Walter cares more about what a book has to say than he does about whether he can turn it into a stuffed animal or a calendar or a movie.

The Newbery Committee was gutsy, too. There would have been safer books. More comfortable books. More familiar books. They took a trip beyond the realm of sameness, with this one, and I think they should be very proud of that.

And all of you, as well. Let me say something to those of you here who do such dangerous work.

The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.

It is very risky.

But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom.

Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.

I have been greatly honored by you now, two times. It is impossible to express my gratitude for that. Perhaps the only way, really, is to return to Boston, to my office, to my desk, and to go back to work in hopes that whatever I do next will justify the faith in me that this medal represents.

There are other rivers flowing.

Source: Lois Lowry, "Newbery Medal Acceptance," in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. LXX, No. 4, July-August, 1994, pp. 414-22.

Patty Campbell

In this excerpt, Patty Campbell, noted author, critic, and general editor of Twayne's Young Adult Author series, discusses the unexpected elements in Lowry's The Giver, with its multilevels of meaning, complex symbolism, and ambiguous conclusion, so radical a change from previous works by the author.

Once in a long while a book comes along that takes hardened young-adult reviewers by surprise, a book so unlike what has gone before, so rich in levels of meaning, so daring in complexity of symbol and metaphor, so challenging in the ambiguity of its conclusion, that we are left with all our neat little everyday categories and judgments hanging useless. Books like Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese or Terry Davis's Mysterious Ways are examples of these rare treasures. But after the smoke of our personal enthusiasm has cleared, we are left with uneasy thoughts: Will young adults understand it? Will the intricate subtleties that so delight us as adult critics go right over their heads? Will the questions posed by the ending leave them puzzled and annoyed, rather than thoughtful and intrigued? It all depends—on the maturity of the particular young adult, on how well we introduce the book and follow up with discussion, and on certain qualities in the book itself. In the past year young-adult literature has been blessed with two such extraordinary works: The Giver by Lois Lowry and You Must Kiss a Whale by David Skinner.

The Giver is particularly surprising because it is a major departure from the style and type of book we have come to expect from Lois Lowry, as Horn Book Editor Anita Silvey pointed out in her July/August 1993 editorial. Up until now, much of Lowry's work has consisted of "contemporary novels with engaging characters that explore something very rare—a functional family." But The Giver is a dystopia, "driven by plot and philosophy—not by character and dialogue," and the picture of the functional family turns disturbingly awry as the story proceeds. Indeed, it is Lowry's skill at depicting cheerful, ordinary reality that makes the revelation of the sinister difference in this alternate reality so chilling.

Most surprising of all is the leap forward Lowry has made in mastering the creation of a sub-text by innuendo, foreshadowing, and resonance. Take, for example, the opening sentence. "It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened." The word December is loaded with resonance: the darkness of the solstice, endings, Christmas, cold. Almost and beginning pull forward to the future source of his fear, "that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen." The name Jonas, too, is evocative—of the biblical Jonah, he who is sent by God to cry against the wickedness of Nineveh, an unwilling lone messenger with a mission that will be received with hostility. In one seemingly simple sentence Lowry sets the mood and direction of her story, foreshadows its outcome, and plants an irresistible narrative pull.

The fascinating gradual revelation of a world and its interlocking rationale as explained by a protagonist immersed in the culture is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Lowry plays with our perceptions and our emotions, creating tension by presenting details of this community that win our approval, and then hinting at something terribly wrong. The family, for instance, seems ideal: a gentle, caring father and mother and the one child of each gender that tells us that this community has solved the population problem; the scenes of their warm, bantering conversations around the dinner table; their formal sharing (as required by the Rules) of feelings from their day and dreams from their night; the comfort and support they offer one another. But then we hear of Birthmothers and applications for children and spouses; we begin to wonder why there are no grandparents and to suspect what lies behind the parents' talk of "release."

Lowry has structured the intriguing details of this planned community with meticulous care, focusing particularly, through Jonas's eyes, on the education system that produces a society which functions by internalized values. At first it seems to be an autocratic state—an impression that is given credence by Orwellian images such as the rasping voices that chastise from ubiquitous speakers. But soon it is revealed that the community is ruled by an elected Committee of Elders and that the citizens long ago chose this controlled life. Each peer group of fifty children is called by their ages—Fives, Elevenses—and is distinguished by certain clothes, haircuts, and required behaviors that are appropriate for their stage of development. At eight they begin to spend their afterschool hours volunteering in the various work of the community, and at twelve they are each given an Assignment, based on the careful observation of the Committee of Elders, which will be their job for life.

When the fateful December ceremony comes, Jonas is stunned to learn that he has been appointed the new Receiver of Memory, the highest position in the community. Each day he goes to the rooms of the old Receiver of Memory, a reclusive elderly man whom he comes to call the Giver. There his innocence is gradually transformed as the old man transmits to him, often with great pain for Jonas, the memories of experiences and emotions that the people have chosen to banish from their minds so that they might sustain the illusion of social order and success. Jonas's first memory-lesson is a sled ride that teaches him the concepts of cold and snow and of "downhill"—ideas that are new to him because the community has abolished weather and irregular terrain in the interests of efficiency. As the days wear on, Jonas experiences war and pain and love, and begins to understand how his society has given up choice and freedom for control and predictability.

And then one day he asks to view a videotape of a "release" that his father has that morning performed on an unwanted baby at the community nursery, and learns to his horror that the euphemism covers engineered death—for the old, for rulebreakers, and for surplus or difficult infants. Watching his father sweetly wave bye-bye to the small corpse as it slides down the disposal chute, Jonas realizes with cold shock that his nurturing family is a sham, held together by trained reactions, not love, and that there is only hollowness at the heart of the society's life. He and the Giver hatch a plot to force the community to change. Jonas will flee, so that the memories he has assimilated will return to the people, forcing them to suffer and grow. But that night Jonas's father announces that Gabriel, the difficult toddler who has been temporarily sharing their home and whom Jonas loves, will be "released" the next morning. There is no time to carry out the plot; in the night, Jonas and Gabriel bicycle away.

And now we come to the inherent difficulty of every dystopia story—how to end. Basically, there are three possibilities. The protagonist escapes as the society collapses; the protagonist escapes with the intention of returning with the seeds of change; or the protagonist escapes, but it turns out to be an illusion. Lowry opts for elements of all three. Jonas journeys for days and days and, finally, at the end of his strength, comes to a place where there is snow, and a hill, and a sled. Here the story, which up till now has been readable as an adventure tale, becomes symbolic and ambiguous as Jonas and the dying baby begin the sled ride toward the faint distant Christmas lights which are part of his memory of love. Is it a dream? Are they already dead? Or will they find a new life? Will the community they left behind reshape itself in a more human mold? Lowry refuses to provide a tidy ending. The challenge of the ambiguity is appropriate for the stature of this intricately constructed masterwork….

Source: Patty Campbell, "The Sand in the Oyster," in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. LXIX, No. 6, November-December, 1993, pp. 717-21.

Sources

Patty Campbell, review in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. LXIX, No. 6, November-December, 1993, pp. 717-21.

Jane Inglis, review in The School Librarian, Vol. 43, No. 1, February, 1995, pp.31-32.

Lois Lowry, Newbery Medal Acceptance speech, delivered at the American Library Association's annual meeting June, 1994, printed in The Horn Magazine, Vol. LXX, No. 4, July-August 1994, pp. 414-22.

Gary D. Schmidt, review in The Five Owls, Vol. VIII, No. 1, September-October, 1993, pp. 14-15

For Further Study

Michael Betzold, Appointment with Doctor Death, Momentum Books, 1993.

A journalist gathers together the evidence and background relating to cases involving Dr. Kevorkian.

Joel D. Chaston, "The Giver," in Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Volume 6, edited by Kirk H. Beetz, Beacham Publishing, Inc., 1994, pp. 3255-63.

This excerpt from a reference book surveys Lowry's life and work, suggests ideas for reports, papers, and discussions related to The Giver, and summarizes the novel's plot, setting, themes, characters, and literary qualities.

Joel D. Chaston, Lois Lowry, Twayne's United States Author Series, edited by Ruth K. MacDonald, Prentice Hall, Intl., 1997.

Chaston tracks Lowry's development as a writer, beginning with her childhood and her sense of story and values, and progressing through her literary career and reputation.

Ilene Cooper, "Giving and Receiving," in Booklist, Vol. 89, April 15, 1993, p. 1506.

An early review that finds the conflict between sameness and freedom in the novel to be thoughtprovoking, but finds Lowry's message "forced," and her ending too ambiguous.

Mary Ellen Flannery, "Parents Want The Giver Off Shelves," in The Palm Beach Post, June 19, 1996.

Flannery reports on the ongoing controversy between Northport Middle School and concerned parent, Anna Cerbasi, who objects to use of The Giver in a public school setting.

Louise Kaplan, "Images of Absence, Voices of Silence," in No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost, Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 216-37.

Psychologist Kaplan discusses the difficulties, yet importance, of bearing witness to traumatic events, and suggests that, since survivors of the Holocaust had to psychically absent themselves in order to survive trauma and abuse, their children must "testify as to what happened" to their parents.

Seymour R. Kester, Utopian Episodes: Daily Life in Experimental Colonies Dedicated to Changing the World, Syracuse University Press, 1996.

An extremely detailed and critical look at the way of life endured by participants in the three principal American Utopias of the nineteenth century.

Walter Lorraine, "Lois Lowry," in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. 70, July-August, 1994, pp. 423-26.

Lowry's editor reminisces about her fiction, which he praises for being immediately accessible to "very broad" audiences.

Lois Lowry, "Calling It Quits," in The Writer, Vol. 102, April, 1989, pp. 13-14, 47.

Lowry discusses the importance of ending a story in the right place, so that readers will want to continue writing the story in their own minds.

Lois Lowry, "Remembering How it Was," in The Writer, Vol. 100, July, 1987, pp. 16-19.

In this exploration of the importance of memory to storytellers, Lowry says that, while the details in a story need not be truthful, the emotions that are connected to the details must be true. She also says that using painful memories in writing is a way to get over them.

Lois Markham, Lois Lowry (Learning Works Meet the Author Series), Learning Works, 1995.

Published for Lowry's young readers, this book shows how the author incorporates significant autobiographical experiences into her fiction.

Donald E. Pitzer, editor, America's Communal Utopias, University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

A collection of essays on the full range of American communities, including the Shakers, George Rapp's Harmony Society and the Oneida Perfectionists.

Karen Ray, "The Giver," in The New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1993, p. 26.

An early review that finds the novel's themes "provocative," despite the novel's "occasional logical lapses."

Michael Sadowski, "Lois Lowry and Allen Say Take Newbery, Caldecott Medals," in School Library Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3, March 1994, p. 123.

An early announcement that Lowry had won her second Newbery medal.

Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, Ivan R. Dee, 1994.

A first-hand account of the disintegration of the communist state written by a correspondent of the Baltimore Sun.

Amanda Smith, "PW Interviews: Lois Lowry," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 229, No. 8, February 21, 1986, pp. 152-53.

An exploration of Lowry's life and work that considers her philosophy of writing for children, and her thoughts about laughter, adaptability, and human relations.

Lesley J. Smith Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, Times Books, 1997.

Openly opposed to euthanasia on principle, Smith has a response to every conceivable argument in defense.

Laura M. Zaidman, "Lois Lowry," in American Writers for Children Since I960: Fiction (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 52), edited by Glenn Estes, Gale Research, 1986, pp. 249-261.

This essay summarizes Lowry's personal and professional life, summarizes criticism of Lowry's pre-1986 work, and includes an excerpt from one of her manuscripts that shows her revisions.