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.” This is another key to the growth of the story and themes of The Giver.
The next memory is of her having lunch with her daughter in a pub. A news story comes on the TV about a mass shooting incident having just occurred: when she hears that it’s in another state, far away from where they’re sitting, she’s relieved. Her daughter is shocked by her reaction. “How comfortable I made myself feel for a moment, by reducing my own realm of caring to my own familiar neighbourhood. How safe I deluded myself into feeling.” This is another important tributary to the river, which is “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.”
These are the memories that Lowry identified as having contributed to the creation of the book. It is worth remembering that for most of the time period covered here, with the exception of her childhood, she was working as a professional writer: she was writing and publishing stories the whole time, and while doing so, over many, many years, this one story was growing and becoming more complex and full in the back of her mind.
We can see here how she has arrived at the heart of the book, the whole point about the dangers of Sameness and Jonas’s understanding that denying negatives automatically means denying positives – no rain, no sun, no grief, no joy.
The next point Lois Lowry makes is about the ambiguous ending to the book. Remember that this speech was given years before she started writing the sequels to The Giver, which necessarily push the ending of the book in one firm direction. She mentions several different interpretations of the ending which readers had told her about. She says that some have seen it as being a “circular journey. The truth that we go out and come back, and that what we have come back to is changed, and so are we. Perhaps I have been travelling in a circle too”.[12]
She then talks about what her circular journey has been. She says “Here are the things I’ve come back to”, and lists:
Her daughter, who had been so horrified by her reaction to the mass shooting, was the first person to read the manuscript of The Giver.
The “different” girl from college is happily living with another woman now.
Her son and German daughter-in-law now have a daughter, “who will be the receiver of all of their memories”.
The photograph she took of the old painter she interviewed who went blind was used as the cover for the first edition of the book in the USA (see p. 26).
| 3.2 | Summaries |
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
The Giver is organised in 23 numbered chapters. The book is short, so the chapters are also quite compact. Here is a brief synopsis of the major events and developments in each chapter, with the page number of the beginning of the chapter provided.
The first seven chapters can be treated as a kind of introduction to this strange world.
The plot begins in chapter eight, when Jonas is selected as the new Receiver of Memory.
We will look more at the structure and organisation of the narrative of The Giver in the chapter in this study guide on 3.3 Structure (p. 42).
1 (p. 9)
Jonas is nearly 12 years old. He is returning home on his bicycle. At home he has dinner with his family (parents and younger sister Lily) and they go through a ritual of talking in turn about their feelings. He is feeling apprehensive about the approaching Ceremony of Twelve.
2 (p. 16)
At dinner, Jonas’ father reminisces about his own childhood and tells Jonas what he can expect from the coming Ceremony of Twelve.
3 (p. 23)
Jonas’ father brings a baby home to care for, one with pale eyes like Jonas. Lily is excited and talks about potential Assignments. Jonas recalls an incident at school where he had been publicly shamed for taking an apple, and thinks about why the apple had caught his attention: he had seen it change in some way he can’t describe while he and Asher had been tossing it back and forth.
4 (p. 28)
Jonas goes to do his volunteer work, and looks for his friend Asher. He finds him working at the House of the Old. Jonas, Asher and another Eleven called Fiona are helping to care for the elderly (“the Old”). The woman Jonas is helping, called Larissa, tells him about a release they had celebrated that morning.
5 (p. 34)
The family’s morning begins with the ritual of Dream-telling, and Jonas tells his family about a vaguely disturbing dream he had had about the girl Fiona. The dream has sexual connotations, with Jonas’ strongest impression being “wanting” (p. 35) the girl, and he doesn’t understand this and feels awkward and uncomfortable. Jonas’ parents tell him he has experienced “the Stirrings” (first sexual feelings of desire). The Stirrings must be reported – which he has done – and treated with pills. His mother gives him a pill and tells him he will now be taking them for the rest of his life. Jonas is on the one hand proud to now be taking the pills like everyone else above a certain age, but he also in a way misses the warm and exciting feelings of sexual desire which he had briefly experienced in his dream.
6 (p. 38)
This important chapter contains a lot of useful information about the rituals, terminology and structures of the community, in particular the way in which family units are organised and children are integrated at the different stages of their lives into the community.
On the first day of the Ceremony the entire community attends the rituals of the children, from newborns being assigned to their new family units through to children aged eight getting their new jackets.
The second day includes the Ceremony of Twelve, which Jonas will participate in. He is nervous beforehand and waits impatiently through the Ceremonies of ages Nine to Eleven. He and Asher talk briefly about a story of a man who didn’t like his Assignment and left to join another community: Asher says he asked to go Elsewhere and was released.
7 (p. 45)
At the Ceremony of Twelves, Jonas is number 19 in the line and waits while the other Elevens are given their Assignments. His friend Asher is assigned Assistant Director of Recreation. Fiona is one place ahead of Jonas and is assigned Caretaker of the Old, which Jonas had expected. But instead of 19, the Chief Elder then calls up number 20, and Jonas is left sitting alone without being called for an Assignment.
8 (p. 51)
Jonas is embarrassed and frightened and the rest of the community is confused by what has happened. The Chief Elder apologises to everyone, including Jonas, and then says that he has not been Assigned, he has been selected – to become the next Receiver of Memory. She says that the Elders have been watching Jonas with this goal in mind for years now, and that the last potential Receiver turned out to be something of a disaster. She lists the qualities that a Receiver must possess, and which they see in Jonas, as intelligence, integrity, courage and wisdom – and a fifth quality, which is only called the Capacity to See Beyond.
Jonas is unnerved and wants to tell them they made a mistake, but when he looks at the community he again has the sensation he had as a child with the apple (see pp. 25–26), and he feels things change.
9 (p. 56)
Jonas notices that people treat him slightly differently afterwards. His parents are uncomfortable when he asks them what happened with the last person to be selected as Receiver, and what went wrong.
Like everyone else in the Ceremony, Jonas has been given instructions for his