The Giver

File:Lowry the giver cover.jpg

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry is a novel set in a possible future society which first seems to be a utopia and gradually appears more and more dystopian. Written in simple yet evocative language, the novel follows a boy named Jonas through the twelfth year of his life. Jonas's society has eliminated pain and strife by converting to "Sameness", a move which has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. Jonas is selected to inherit the position of "Receiver of Memory", the man who stores all the memories of the time before Sameness, in case they are ever needed. As Jonas receives the memories from his predecessor—the Giver—he discovers how shallow his Community's life has become.

The novel forms a loose trilogy with Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004), two other books set in the same future period.

Plot summary

At first glance, the novel's setting seems to be a utopia, where all possible steps are taken to eliminate pain and anguish. Two-way speakers monitor every household for rule infractions. The people are almost always compliant; families share their dreams and feelings on a daily basis to defuse emotional buildup. This society remains harmonious by matching up husbands and wives based on personality compatibility. As time progresses in the novel, it is realized that the society has lost contact with the ideas of "family" and "love" (at least in the "more complete" sense at which Lowry hints). Children are born to designated "Birthmothers" and then distributed, one boy and one girl per family (a balancing of populations). After family units have served their purpose of raising the children in a stable environment, they cease to exist, the parents going to a communal housing facility for childless adults, and the children becoming involved in their work and starting mono-generational families of their own. The Community maintains this process using pills which suppress romantic or sexual feelings.

All the land near the Community (and around the other, similar towns clustered about the nearby river) has been flattened to aid agriculture and transportation. Even the climate is somehow technologically controlled so that the weather never changes.

The Community is run by a council of Elders that assigns each 12-year-old the job he or she will perform for the rest of his or her life. People are bound by an extensive set of Rules touching every aspect of life, which if violated require a simple (but somewhat ceremonious) apology. In some cases, violating the Rules is "winked at": older siblings invariably teach their younger brothers and sisters how to ride a bicycle before the children are officially permitted to learn the skill. In more severe cases, or if the offender has committed serious infractions twice before, he or she may be punished by "Release".

The "Ceremony of Release" recurs throughout the novel, becoming more ominous as more details are revealed. Early in the story, we learn that the procedure is generally considered a shameful fate, particularly if the one released is an adult, functioning member of society. On the other hand, Release of the elderly is an occasion of joyful celebration, and Release of an infant brings a sense of "what-could-we-have-done". Later, we learn the specific criteria for which infants—under the care of assigned Nurturers before they are assigned to families—are selected for Release. In particular, if a Birthmother produces twins, a Nurturer weighs them and Releases the smaller.

The general belief of the people, and possibly even the people who perform the "Ceremony of Release", is that the people are sent "Elsewhere", which we are led to believe is some kind of other community.

We follow the book's protagonist, Jonas, as he awaits the Ceremony of Twelve. He is a curious, compassionate person who genuinely wants closer relationships, as represented by the motif of nakedness. Jonas lives in what seems to be a normal family unit, his mother a lawyer, his father a Nurturer. He is selected to be "Receiver of Memory," because of his unusual "capacity to see beyond." He trains for the position of Receiver by receiving memories from the seemingly aged incumbent (who in reality is only aged by the emotional weight of the memories), whom he calls the Giver. These memories are images from the world before Sameness, "back and back and back"—things that no one else in Jonas's world remembers. The people of Jonas's world, it turns out, cannot see color, and this is the "beyond" that he had first seen.

Through the Giver, Jonas receives memories of war, hunger, wildlife and natural beauty, loss, adventure, and family. Eventually, these revelations prompt Jonas to seek to change the Community and return emotion to those he loves.

Themes

As in the film Pleasantville, color represents diversity and a depth of feeling beyond that which the majority of society enjoys. In The Giver, however, objects do not "gain" color through intense emotional experiences on the part of their observers; rather, Jonas learns to see the colors which objects intrinsically possess. Apparently, the transition to Sameness involved removing color vision from the people, although the Giver implies that genetic engineers also attempted (without total success) to remove the variability in the human population. Even light eyes and red hair are both rarities.

A motif of nudity recurs in several places. During his volunteer hours (a time when children aged eight to twelve explore their community and prepare for an eventual career), Jonas assists in the House of the Old, where the most aged members of the Community reside. Lowry describes how Jonas bathes an old woman, Larissa; he enjoys the trusting, carefree nature of the experience, which reminds him of his father caring for an infant. Jonas muses about how his Community has strict rules against nakedness, in almost all circumstances. He personally finds them a nuisance—such as the admonition to keep oneself entirely covered while changing for athletic games—and doesn't understand why the Community would institute such precautions. Later, the tenderness of the bathing scene gains a sexual edge, when Jonas dreams about cajoling a female friend, the red-haired Fiona, to remove her clothes and climb into a tub so that he can bathe her. Jonas recounts this dream at his family's breakfast dream-telling, and his parents recognize it as an early sign of what they call "the Stirrings". A daily pill makes the Stirrings go away.

Music plays a role in The Giver, although its presence is very subdued. Just as it is possible to read well into the novel without realizing that its characters do not see color—often until the Giver mentions that a thing called "color" once existed—it is also easy to miss the fact that the Community has no music. One of the few clues is when Larissa describes a Ceremony of Release for an old man who was leaving the Community. "We chanted the anthem," she says, a phrasing which implies an absence of melody. Later, when the Giver is instructing Jonas, we learn that as a boy, the Giver had a faculty much like Jonas's ability to "see beyond". In the Giver's case, it was hearing beyond: he began to hear "something truly remarkable, which is called music". (This sense is more mystical than Jonas's, in that we can understand how objects have color which people are unable to see, but we cannot identify a natural source of music—unless the Giver discovered he could hear musical patterns in everyday sound, such as Mozart reputedly did.)

Characters

• Jonas: the protagonist, an Eleven when the novel opens, who is selected to become Receiver of Memory at his Ceremony of Twelve.
• The Giver: the incumbent Receiver of Memory, who stores human experiences from the time before Sameness. The Community's Elders rely upon his "wisdom" in the event of emergencies; because no one wants the pain that comes with keeping the necessary memories, this "honor" is restricted to one individual.
• Jonas's Mother: an intelligent, practical woman who serves her Community as a lawyer.
• Jonas's Father: a caring man, something of the ideal father figure, who works as a Nuturer for children in their first year of life. Later, Jonas learns that his father is responsible for the Release of defective children.
• Lily: Jonas's talkative, enthusiastic and outgoing younger sister.
• Asher: Jonas's closest friend, a cheerful and easygoing boy who is assigned the position of Assistant Director of Recreation.
• Fiona: Female friend and co-eval of both Jonas and Asher. She represents a failure of genetic engineering, as the Giver notes. "We never completely mastered Sameness [...] Hair like Fiona's must drive them crazy."
• Gabriel: an infant from the Nurturing Center whom Jonas's father takes home for extra care. Slow in development and highly emotional, Gabriel is at risk of Release.
• Rosemary: the Elders' previous selection to be the new Receiver of Memory, when Jonas was a Two. Her training failed, in a way which impacted the entire Community: defeated by the memories of loss and hurt which the Giver was forced to transfer, she asked for Release. Once she was "Elsewhere", the memories given her had no place to go, so they floated freely and everyone could experience them. "All those feelings," the Giver says; the people "had never experienced anything like that before." Consequently, Rosemary's name was deemed unspeakable, and upon his selection Jonas was forbidden to apply for voluntary Release.

Origins

According to her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, the stream of ideas which became The Giver originated when Lois Lowry lived in Japan, at the age of eleven. Her family dwelled in an American enclave, "Washington Heights", near the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Dissatisfied with the American elementary school, the tiny library full of American books—with the entire transplanted United States lifestyle—one day the young Lowry snuck out the back gate into Shibuya. She found the experience rewarding enough to repeat:

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.

Many years later, Lowry still recalled the smells and sounds of Shibuya, remembering most of all the blue-uniformed schoolchildren, "the strangers who are my own age". Among the tumult of life in that district, she noticed the widespread noise of wooden sticks being banged together, of young men shouting and waving banners—acts which turned out to be Communist demonstrations [1].

Looking back at this experience, Lowry relates that it was an example of what every child must do eventually: leave the safety of his or her village. Because Shibuya was such a different place, divided so sharply from Washington Heights, her journey was a touch more dramatic than most.

The man pictured on the book's cover is Carl Nelson, a painter who lived alone on an island off the coast of Maine. Lowry visited him in 1979, sent there to research a magazine story. His vivid and detailed sense of color impressed her greatly. Years later, she heard that he went blind. Pondering the matter, sadly and whimsically, she began to imagine if he could have magically given her the ability to see the way he had. These experiences, and others like them, percolated and gradually formed the background for a story.

Lowry describes creating the pain-free world of Jonas's Community in her Newbery speech:

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, poverty, prejudice 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.

Fans of The Giver are no doubt gratified that Lois Lowry went beyond the place she was tempted to stop; those who have attempted to ban the book from schools are probably less pleased.

Awards and inspirations

Lois Lowry has won several awards for her work on The Giver. Lowry was awarded the 1994 Newbery Medal for The Giver. The Giver also received the 1996 William Allen White Award[2]. Additionally, the American Library Association lists The Giver both as "Best Book for Young Adults" and as a "Notable Children's Book".

For many years, Lowry refused to elaborate upon the novel's ambiguous ending. If her fan mail is any indication, readers wished to know what "really happened" to Jonas and Gabriel, more than any other single topic raised by her fiction. The most guidance Lowry gave her readers was that she did not believe Jonas and Gabriel simply die:

How could it not be an optimistic ending, a happy ending, when that house is there with its lights on and music is playing? So I'm always kind of surprised and disappointed when some people tell me that they think that the boy and the baby just die. I don't think they die. What form their new life takes is something I like people to figure out for themselves. And each person will give it a different ending. [3]

After a decade of this uncertainty, Lowry revealed the next episode in the characters' lives in her novel Messenger (2004), set seven years after The Giver concludes. (Only Gabriel is mentioned by name, but the young man known as "Leader" is clearly Jonas.)

The Giver also inspired Rodman Philbrick, who cited The Giver as inspiration for his novel The Last Book in the Universe (2000).

A film adaptation of The Giver is currently under development by Walden Media. Details have been slow in forthcoming, but as of 2005 the film is expected to star Jeff Bridges in a screenplay written by Todd Alcott [4].

Challenged book

The suitability of The Giver for middle school students is periodically challenged by some politically and socially conservative advocacy groups. The concerns typically cited include the book's treatment of suicide, sexuality, euthanasia and the occult. The American Library Association lists The Giver as the United States's eleventh most challeged book for the period 1990-1999, and the fourteenth most challenged from 1990 to 2000. The change may be due to the increased popularity of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice series and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. [5]

Between 1999 and 2001, The Giver was challenged in at least five separate states, sometimes more than once.

On 6 January 2005, the Associated Press wire service reported that parents in Blue Springs, Missouri wished to remove The Giver from the eighth-grade reading list, almost eight years after it was placed there. Parents referred to the book as "violent" and "sexually explicit".

Readings and references

• The Giver, by Lois Lowry (1993). ISBN 0440237688.
• Lois Lowry's web site has an informative Speeches section and a summary of The Giver itself
• Article summarizing attempts to ban The Giver