02. No One Wants What The Giver Offers

Lois Lowry's classic is the kind of children's book that isn't written anymore

THE GIVER is deceptively simple, the kind of book that worms its way into your brain over time. It won Lois Lowry, the author, many awards, including the prestigious Newbery Medal for children’s literature, yet somehow I still find myself shocked at just how good it is.

Jonas (no last name) lives in “the Community,” a closed-off city state where residents have little communication with the outside world, along with his father, his mother, and his sister. The community does receive some supplies, and possibly conducts trade, with other communities, but the details of this are never clear. Jonas is an “Eleven,” meaning he’s roughly eleven years old.

The Community is idyllic. There is no crime, and everyone has all their needs met. There is very little pain in the community; quick and effective painkillers are readily available in the event of a scraped knee. Each child lives in a happy, stable nuclear family, comprised of a father, a mother, and one or two children (if two, they will be a boy and a girl). A highly structured society governs their lives, drawing the path to peace and prosperity. This plays out in both cultural and institutional processes. Any time a child hurts another, they dutifully apologize. As children age, they are given new responsibilities and privileges. Sevens are given clothes they can put on or remove themselves (buttons on the front, not the back), Eights are separated from their “comfort objects” (stuffed animals), Nines are given bicycles, and so on until they become twelves, at which point they are assigned a job, which they will hold for the rest of their life. This path is carefully laid out to increase the children in independence and autonomy. There’s no helicopter parenting, and they do not raise an anxious generation.

Anyone who upsets this careful balance has no place in the Community. Violent individuals, rule breakers, the elderly, babies with health issues – each is “released.”

Like all the children, Jonas is greatly looking forward to the upcoming ceremony of twelve. However, as the day approaches, he begins to notice some changes in himself and his surroundings. He looks at an apple, or his friend Fiona’s hair, and it looks different. He doesn’t understand it yet, but he’s beginning to see the color red, which is unperceivable to others. He begins to experience “stirrings,” the euphemism used in the Community to describe sexual attraction. Jonas’ first stirring is a dream (which he reports to his parents, as is the custom to do with all dreams) where he is in a bath, urging his friend Fiona to undress and get in the bath with him. While not explicit, this experience of sexual attraction is described very earnestly and honestly, surprisingly so for a children’s book with such a young protagonist. Jonas’ parents promptly instruct him to begin taking daily pills, which remove the stirrings, and he complies.

It’s a bit difficult to determine if The Community is a left- or right-wing dystopia. Most dystopian novels, being deeply concerned with the ordering of society, do fit somewhere into a political matrix, even if uncomfortably. THE HANDMAID’S TALE is a dystopia of oppressive conservative ideals, while THE FOUNTAINHEAD presents a vision of liberal oppression. The politics of THE GIVER, meanwhile, are somewhat inscrutable.

On the right-hand side, the Community is based on an incredibly rigid social hierarchy, with every individual’s place determined for them based on their age and the council’s decisions, and it’s not up for discussion. The Community reveres a 1950s-style nuclear family (husband, wife, son, and daughter) to an almost comical degree. There’s an intense distrust of outsiders, to the point where residents don’t know anything about anyone on the outside. The Community is racially homogenous, with each child genetically engineered to be white¹. A small subset of women are selected to be “birth mothers,” bearing three children before being subjected to a life of physical labor in the fields. Order in the Community rests on a thorough suppression of sexuality.

On the left-hand, though, it’s not like they aren’t in touch with their emotions. The family’s nightly dinner-table conversation involves nailing down, with incredible specificity, the exact words to describe the various emotions they felt during the day, in a way that would make Dr. Becky proud. The children must clarify that they didn’t feel “angry,” but “frustrated.” This isn’t just a quirk of Jonas’ family, either; it’s embedded throughout the culture of The Community. Furthermore, Jonas’ dad has the job of “Nurturer.” He cares for the babies. He’s a gentle man, not a touch of toxic masculinity in him. Jonas’ family structure is downright progressive. Being a birth-mother is looked down upon, and women would rather work². A common joke among the community is that you can always request a new job assignment, at which point the committee will “commission a study.” Everyone laughs, in their shared understanding that this study will never be completed. What inefficient government bureaucrats!

At the ceremony of twelve, one of Jonas’ friends is assigned “director of recreation,” and another “caretaker of the old.” Jonas, however, seems to be skipped over, before being given a surprising and mysterious assignment: Receiver of Memory.

Jonas begins meeting with his predecessor, now referred to as The Giver, to begin his training. The Giver explains that the Receiver of Memory holds all the memories of life before The Community, of the way the world used to be (ie how it is in real life, for the reader). From time to time, the Community leaders will ask the Receiver for wisdom and guidance, but mostly his job is simply to hold onto these memories, all of them, so that no one else has to. Then, their training begins. Each day, the Giver places his hand on Jonas’ back and transfers memories to him.³

The first memory is of a sled ride, pure unadulterated joy. But other memories are distressing and painful. He learns about war and death and starvation. He learns about grandparents and sailing and love. It’s painful and exciting and enlivening and Jonas wants more. He receives the Giver’s favorite memory, of a family opening gifts on Christmas morning.

Lowry does not sanitize the painful memories for her young readers. Here’s the scene where Jonas learns about war, quoted at length:

He was in a confused, noisy, foul-smelling place. It was daylight, early morning, and the air was thick with smoke that hung, yellow and brown, above the ground. Around him, everywhere, far across the expanse of what seemed to be a field, lay groaning men. A wild-eyed horse, its bridle torn and dangling, trotted frantically through the mounds of men, tossing its head, whinnying in panic. It stumbled, finally, then fell, and did not rise.

Jonas heard a voice next to him. “Water,” the voice said in a parched, croaking whisper.”

He turned his head toward the voice and looked into the half-closed eyes of a boy who seemed not much older than himself. Dirt streaked the boy’s face and his matted blond hair. He lay sprawled, his gray uniform glistening with wet, fresh blood.

The colors of the carnage were grotesquely bright: the crimson wetness on the rough and dusty fabric, the ripped shreds of grass, startlingly green, in the boy’s yellow hair.

The boy stared at him. “Water,” he begged again. When he spoke, a new spurt of blood drenched the coarse cloth across his chest and sleeve.

One of Jonas’ arms was immobilized with pain, and he could see through his own torn sleeve something that looked like ragged flesh and splintery bone. He tried his remaining arm and felt it move. Slowly he reached to his side, felt the metal container there, and removed its cap, stopping the small motion of his hand now and then to wait for the surging pain to ease. Finally, when the container was open, he extended his arm slowly across the blood-soaked earth, inch by inch, and held it to the lips of the boy. Water trickled into the imploring mouth and down the grimy chin.

The boy sighed. His head fell back, his lower jaw dropping as if he had been surprised by something. A dull blankness slid slowly across his eyes. He was silent.

But the noise continued all around: the cries of the wounded men, the cries begging for water and for Mother and for death. Horses lying on the ground shrieked, raised their heads, and stabbed randomly toward the sky with their hooves.

From the distance, Jonas could hear the thud of cannons. Overwhelmed by pain, he lay there in the fearsome stench for hours, listened to the men and animals die, and learned what warfare meant.⁴

It is a brutal scene. Most of the book is told in a fairly plain, unadorned narrative voice, but when these memories appear, Lowry dials up the detailed images of panic and horror. There is no redemption in this scene. Jonas cannot save these young men, nor does he use this knowledge to save others. He only learns about war and pain and begins to accept them as part of life.

As Jonas becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the Community’s rejection of feelings, good and bad, he asks the Giver for more information about “release.” His father has recently announced that a baby at the care center is going to be released that day, and the Giver reveals that they can watch it via a closed-circuit camera. They switch on the monitor, and Jonas watches as his father injects the baby with a fatal serum. The baby cries, then goes limp. Jonas’ father casually disposes of the body down a garbage chute.⁵

THE GIVER is a deeply human story, of a society that makes great effort to avoid pain, discomfort, and all the other messiness of human experience. They name emotions as a means to control them, stuff them into tidy boxes with delineated borders, and therefore to avoid being controlled by them. The more time spent thinking about whether they’re “upset” or “frustrated” or “riled,” the less capacity they have to actually experience that anger in their body. The better they can keep their emotions under control, the more easily they can do things like euthanize babies.

But by the time Jonas sees what’s really happening, he’s stopped shutting off his emotions. He enters the memories and lets himself feel them, without the cloud of analysis. He throws away his pill each morning and allows himself unrequited yearning for his crush. He is a whole person, and he cannot stand what the Community is doing.

Jonas takes a baby scheduled for release, and together they flee.

When I ask students if they would take Jonas’ bargain, to know both pain and love rather than neither, each one raises their hand. Of course they do! You would answer the same, as would I and your therapist and your barber and your best friend and your mother and everyone else in your life. They’ve read the books and the poems, even if only in school, and they’ve at least listened to the breakup songs. We all know that it’s better to have loved and lost than to never love at all. Pay attention to a single piece of art, it doesn’t even have to be a good one, and you’ll probably get this message beaten into your skull.

The brilliance of THE GIVER is that it doesn’t just repeat this lesson. It doesn’t just dramatize it. THE GIVER actually asks you, the reader, to actively make the choice.

Jonas’ escape mirrors his training with The Giver. It starts well, then takes a turn. Once he leaves the Community’s borders, he enters a beautiful world. He bikes past streams and forests. He sees deer and other wild animals for the first time. It’s quite nice! Then he hits a bump, falls off his bike, and twists his ankle. Without any medicine, he has to carry on, pedaling through the pain. He runs out of food and feels deep, aching hunger. The baby Gabriel is starving too and won’t stop crying. They get drenched in freezing rain. Jonas thinks back to his life in the Community, and he wonders if leaving was a mistake.

The final chapter opens with several distressing pages of Jonas and Gabriel growing weak and numb in the snow. It’s brutal, far worse than the memories of war, because now it’s happening to Jonas and the baby.

Standing in the freezing mound that was thickening around his numb feet, Jonas opened his own tunic, held Gabriel to his bare chest, and tied the torn and dirty blanket around them both. Gabriel moved feebly against him and whimpered briefly into the silence that surrounded them.

It’s snowing heavily, and Jonas tries to cheer up Gabriel (and himself) by talking about the pleasant memories, which are not his, of sledding. Snow, he tells the freezing baby, is “very beautiful.” Then,

There was no response from the child who had once been so curious and alert. Jonas looked down through the dusk at the little head against his chest. Gabriel’s curly hair was matted and filthy, and there were tearstains outlined in dirt on his pale cheeks. His eyes were closed. As Jonas watched, a snowflake drifted down and was caught briefly for a moment’s sparkle in the tiny fluttering eyelashes.⁶

Ever since receiving that first memory, Jonas has wanted to see snow, to experience it for himself. Now he gets that, and it is killing him. He collapses in the snow, then picks himself up and trudges up the hill.

As he approached the summit of the hill at last, something began to happen. He was not warmer; if anything, he felt more numb and more cold. He was not less exhausted; on the contrary, his steps were leaden, and he could barely move his freezing, tired legs.

But he began, suddenly, to feel happy. He began to recall happy times. He remembered his parents and his sister. He remembered his friends, Asher and Fiona. He remembered The Giver.

Memories of joy flooded through him suddenly.

Jonas and Gabriel find, somehow, a sled atop a hill. They get on it and begin sliding down.

Jonas felt himself losing consciousness and with his whole being willed himself to stay upright atop the sled, clutching Gabriel, keeping him safe. 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.

He forced his eyes open as they went downward, downward, sliding, and all at once he could see the lights, and he recognized them now. He knew they were shining through the windows of rooms, that they were red, blue, and yellow lights that twinkled from trees in places where families created and kept memories, where they celebrated love.

Downward, downward, faster and faster. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and that they were waiting, too, for the baby. For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing.

Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.

That’s it. The book ends ambiguously, Jonas and Gabriel’s fate left unclear. Many, many teachers have given students the assignment to tack their own non-ambiguous ending to the end of that passage. Do not do this. It’s a bad assignment. There are really only two reasonable interpretations:

The first option is that Jonas and Gabriel make it to “elsewhere,” against all odds, by encountering real life counterparts to the first memory (a sled) and the favorite memory (Christmas). This would require an enormous plot coincidence, while conveying a worldview where good always works out in the end. THE GIVER, frankly, isn’t that kind of book.

The second option is that Jonas and Gabriel freeze to death, and in his final moments Jonas hallucinates the only happy memories he has, which are not even his own. This is consistent with both the text as written, and with some real-life descriptions of hypothermia, where the patient becomes euphoric at the end. Note that Jonas begins to feel happy before he seemingly encounters the sled.

The entire book is centered on this moral theory that it is bad to turn away from the hard, uncomfortable, and even the cruel things in life, that doing so amounts to a retreat from your own humanity into some comforting fantasy. It is important, then, that Lowry doesn’t make the ending clear. If the book had clearly stated that they die, the reader would have their reaction (anger, stated with precision of language) then move on. But without clarity, the reader is invited to decide for themselves. They must choose whether to believe in a convenient, happy ending, based in coincidence and a romanticism inconsistent with the rest of the book they’ve just read, or to accept what is obvious and clear, even if it means closing the book with a pit in your stomach. The reader is offered the same choice as Jonas.

When I ask my students what they think happened to Jonas and Gabriel, nearly all of them say they make it to the cabin and start a new life. Despite their earlier declarations that they would take Jonas’ bargain (and I ask both questions on the same day), they cannot accept a cruel ending. Even when I explain exactly what I just wrote above, when I lay out before them the trick the book is playing, most still refuse. It’s just too painful.

Though it took about two decades, THE GIVER birthed an entire genre of youth literature, a collection of derivatives and copycats, each more dishonest than the last. These books and movies replicate the general aesthetic, turning familiar words into otherworldly labels. While Jonas is “the receiver,” Katniss Everdeen is “the tribute.” Yet, these stories fail to truly let their readers be uncomfortable. The stories are just too exciting. Whereas Jonas is singled out for the privilege to carry pain, Katniss’ burden is to be a badass with a bow and arrow. These are cleaned up pop-dystopias, the hard edges eventually giving way to a fun action adventure.⁷

Even Lois Lowry herself seems uncomfortable with what she’s created. In the decades since THE GIVER was published, Lowry wrote and published three sequels, which reveal that, actually, Jonas and Gabriel lived! There is no ambiguity, thank god! These sequels were published seven, eleven,⁸ and nineteen years after THE GIVER, and Lowry has clearly stated that the original was imagined and written as a standalone novel with an ambiguous ending. It’s unclear why she changed her mind. Perhaps she just received one too many letters from distraught children and couldn’t bear their pain any longer.

When I taught THE GIVER to my students, I was in my early twenties. I liked the book – you’d have to be a fool to not recognize it as great literature – but I also considered it somewhat simplistic. Jonas learns, as many do, that you can’t go through life avoiding pain. If you want to experience the fullness of life and all its goodness, you must be willing to take the bad too. That’s a good story, but one that, I thought, lacked complexity and nuance. I felt that my curriculum didn’t have space for two dystopias, and I opted to keep FAHRENHEIT 451 instead.⁹

When I read THE GIVER today, at thirty-five, I’m gutted. It sickens me in a way that few books do. I begin thinking about all the times I’ve chosen easy and sanitized things over the raw messiness of life. I think about my own kids and my innate desire to protect them from pain. I think about my grandparents and how, when I was a child, their holidays were like those of the Giver’s favorite memories, but as they aged, their lives began to creep closer and closer to the displacement of the elderly Community members. I think about Jonas, shivering and starving during his botched escape, wondering if he made the wrong choice. I begin to question my own choices, and I do not feel confident in my answers.

I must have been ten or eleven years old, almost Jonas’ age, when I first read THE GIVER. I was holding the book in my hands, reading while I walked through the halls of my elementary school towards the playground. I used my elbow to push open the doors, out into the frigid Idaho air, and the paperback slipped from my hands. The library book fell to the ground and landed in the slushy, half-melted snow. Muddy water quickly soaked up into the pages. I felt surprise, then a pang of guilt followed by shame. I was afraid that I would get into trouble. I retrieved the book and rushed back to the classroom and put it in front of my teacher. I’m sorry, I said. Can we fix it? No, she said. Some things can’t be fixed.

1. In case you think I'm making this up, it is clearly spelled out. During one lesson, the Giver tells Jonas that, in the old days, before the Community and before genetic manipulation to create "sameness," skin could be different colors. When learning about color, Jonas sees a reddish/pinkish hue on people's faces. Later, while receiving a memory about poachers killing an elephant in Africa, Jonas is reminded of what the Giver said about different skin colors. So, yeah. They're all white. Though we're getting far into subtext here, it's not a stretch to describe the community as a white supremacist compound.

2. Ok, this isn't actually a left-wing thought, but some people sure think it is.

3. One of Lowry's smartest decisions, from a writing perspective, is to never explain how this works. It just does.

4. The Giver, page 118-120

5. Adult readers will see, from miles away, the twist that "release" is not banishment or transfer to an outside community, but euthanasia (or execution, in the case of rule breakers). To many young readers, this comes as quite a shock, and an effectively played one at that. It sticks with the readers. One year, I was hosting a final exam study session, when an administrator unexpectedly entered the room to inform the students they would be released early. Panic ensued!

6. I'm including so many quotes here, in part because I want to show how affecting this text is. I have a child close to Gabriel's age, and I actually had a hard time typing these quotes.

7. THE HUNGER GAMES is even one of the better ones. By the time we get to DIVERGENT and other such things, it's even worse. The less said about THE GIVER's own movie adaptation, the better. It seems to exist only because dystopias were hot and Jeff Bridges wasn't getting any younger. Turns out, though, he didn't much care for the end product either:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/02/jeff-bridges-the-giver-movie-regrets?srsltid=AfmBOooInXhzsniLBVMk41bM1NfRDtUMpx3xAbutFVlg-aJjJbsacm96

8. Jonas is not definitely revealed as alive until this third entry in the series. The second book includes a reference to an unnamed character who, in book three, is identified as Jonas.

9. As you will see later, I still love FAHRENHEIT 451. Ray Bradbury is one of my favorites, and always will be. But my opinion of the two has flipped, and I now see THE GIVER as a much richer text, in part because it has meaning and applicability for people who aren't generally into books. If I truly didn't have space for both, my curriculum today would keep Lowry, not Bradbury.