The Giver Summary: Lois Lowry's Story of Memory, Choice and Sameness
What The Giver is about
Lois Lowry's The Giver, published in 1993, is set in a community that has removed pain and strife by adopting what it calls Sameness. The trade is a severe one. Along with suffering, the community has given up colour, climate, varied terrain and emotional depth. Everyone has an assigned role. Everyone is equal, in the narrowest sense of that word. The town is isolated from everything except a few similar towns, and nobody remembers anything that happened before.
Jonas is twelve. The annual Ceremony of Twelve is approaching, at which the Committee of Elders assigns each child a life's work. Jonas is nervous. His father is a Nurturer, caring for infants, and his mother holds a senior post in the Department of Justice, and both reassure him. At the ceremony his name is skipped. Only when every other child has been called does the Chief Elder explain that Jonas has not been given an ordinary assignment. He has been selected as the next Receiver of Memory.
The job carries high status and heavy responsibility. The Receiver holds the memories of all history, and is the only person allowed books beyond the permitted texts. Those memories exist so that one person can advise the Council of Elders with some perspective. The rules Jonas is handed cut him off from his friends, require him to keep his training secret, and permit him to lie and to withhold his feelings, which the community otherwise forbids. The isolation starts immediately.
The main characters
Jonas is the twelve-year-old protagonist, distinguished by unusually pale eyes and by an ability he comes to call seeing beyond. He is thoughtful and obedient at the start, and the book tracks what happens when an obedient child is handed knowledge that his whole society has agreed to forget.
The current Receiver, who asks Jonas to call him the Giver, is an old man who has carried the weight alone. He transfers memories by touch. The first is sliding down a snow-covered hill on a sled, which stuns Jonas, who has never seen snow, a hill or a sled. Later come a rainbow, then hunger and war. The Giver also mentions a previous apprentice named Rosemary, without saying at first what became of her.
Gabriel is an infant at the Nurturing Centre who is failing to thrive. Jonas's father gains permission to bring him home at night. Gabriel has pale eyes like Jonas and the Giver, and Jonas discovers the baby can receive memories too. If Gabriel does not grow stronger, he will be released from the community. Jonas's parents, kind and entirely conventional, round out the household, and the Chief Elder presides over the ceremonies that shape every life in the town.
The themes
Memory sits at the centre. Lowry's question is whether a society that forgets can be said to be moral at all. The Giver argues that without memory, people cannot know right from wrong. They are not wicked. They simply have no reference point.
Then there is the cost of safety. Sameness delivers order, security and conformity, and in return it takes colour, music, weather, grief, love and choice. Jonas has to work out whether the new feelings arriving in his head are good, evil or something in between, and whether you can have one without the other. That is the moral engine of the book.
It is also a coming-of-age story. Jonas grows away from his classmates and from his parents, which is what adolescence does anyway. Here the gap is unbridgeable. Scholars have written at length on the novel's handling of memory, religion, colour, eugenics and utopia.
The ending, with spoilers
The Giver shows Jonas a secret recording of his father at work. Releasing turns out to mean a lethal injection. His father performs it on the smaller of two identical newborns, identical people being forbidden, and puts the body in a chute. Jonas understands that release is death, and that Rosemary, who could not bear the darker memories, took poison. He and the Giver plan for Jonas to leave, which would return the memories to the community, while the Giver stays to help the people cope before joining Rosemary in death. The plan is rushed when Jonas learns Gabriel is to be released. The pair flee, and reach the edge of what Jonas takes to be Elsewhere, close to death from cold and hunger. He finds a sled on a snowy hill and rides down towards a house with coloured lights and a Christmas tree, hearing what he believes is music. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, and Jonas shows symptoms of hypothermia. At the 2009 National Book Festival, Lowry told an audience: "Jonas is alive, by the way. You don't need to ask that question."
Why it still matters
The Giver won the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. A 2012 School Library Journal survey placed it fourth among all children's novels. It is required reading on many middle school curricula in the United States, Canada and Australia, and it is also one of the most frequently challenged books in American libraries, ranking 11th for the 1990s, 23rd for the 2000s and 61st for the 2010s. Three further novels set in the same world followed: Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004) and Son (2012). A 2014 film adaptation directed by Philip Noyce starred Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep and Brenton Thwaites. The book suits readers from about eleven upwards, and adults who want a short, cold, exact argument about what comfort costs.
