In “The Giver”, we are introduced to Jonas, the eleven-year-old protagonist of the story, as he struggles to find the right word to describe his feelings as he approaches an important milestone. He rejects “frightened” as too strong a word, recalling a time when he had really been frightened: a year ago, an unidentified aircraft flew over his community; it was a strange and unprecedented event, since Pilots were not allowed to fly over the community. As Jonas remembers the community reaction to the event, we learn more about the society in which he lives. It is extremely structured, with official orders transmitted through loudspeakers planted all around the community. As a punishment, the pilot was “released” from the community, the worst fate that can befall a citizen. Jonas decides he is apprehensive, not frightened (Jonas and his society value the use of precise and accurate language), about the important thing that is going to happen in December. Jonas thinks he lives in a perfect world. He lives in a highly ordered community where there is no pain, but he learns that there is a price to pay for this kind of life and discovers humanity’s long forgotten pains and joys. He finds out that he is living in a twisted messed up imperfect “utopia”. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the Community. When Jonas turns twelve, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. The truth is that secrets are being kept in his community and it is his assignment to protect them. Jonas was assigned to hold all of the memories for his society. He learned things that he wished he did not know and finds out the truth behind the laws. Jonas learned that when people are released from the community, it does not actually mean that they are banished, when people are released, they are actually “put to sleep” or killed. People in is his community cannot see color, but he and the receiver can, he can also hear music, which is very unique He has something unique about him. Jonas learns that to remove the bad you have to remove the good. At the beginning of The Giver, I had a difficult time figuring out the setting of the novel. (The setting is in a utopian community that is part of a larger utopian society.) I did not know what it is that Jonas was afraid of, from the reference of unidentified aircraft; I thought maybe he lived in a war zone or some kind of “Avatar setting”. As, I continued reading I found out that it is against the rules for Pilots to fly over the community, so it appears that Jonas lives in a community that is different from my own, but I did not know at first exactly how different. The author, Lowry allows the small details about life in Jonas’s community to build up gradually into a more complete picture throughout the story. The setting of the story is integral. The setting of the book is a managed community in a futuristic society. Jonas lives in a place where everything is regulated so that the unexpected never happens. Important places in the story were the Maturing Center: a place where new children are cared for and prepared to be assigned to a family unit.; House of the Old: a senior citizen home. Hall of the Old: where all of the data about people exists and is available to the public; Recreation Center: where the children play. Jonas first notices color when throwing an apple to Asher. Asher is his friend and Recreation Director.; Dwelling: Houses where family units sleep and eat; Releasing Room: the room where they put people to sleep in a horrible way; The Annex: this is the home of the Giver in the book, intended for Jonas, the next Receiver of memory. It is here where Jonas receives memories, and it is only the only area in the whole community with privacy, or locks, access to turn of the speaker, and the ability to view information from the Hall of Closed Records. ; Elsewhere: this is where Jonas travels to at the end of the book when he is trying to escape from Sameness that shelters everyone from war pain, and true feelings. Elsewhere is like the world we live in now. There were several characters that help make up “The Giver” (flat characters) such as; Jonas’ Mother, Gabe, Lily, Roberto, Rosemary, and Asher. The main characters (fully developed) were; Jonas; on the surface, Jonas is like any other eleven-year-old boy living in his community. He seems more intelligent and perceptive than many of his peers, and he thinks more seriously than they do about life, worrying about his own future as well as his friend Asher’s. He enjoys learning and experiencing new things: he chooses to volunteer at a variety of different centers rather than focusing on one, because he enjoys the freedom of choice that volunteer hours provide. He also enjoys learning about and connecting with other people, and he craves more warmth and human contact than his society permits or encourages. The things that really set him apart from his peers are his unusual eyes. His ability to see things change in a way that he cannot explain, which in turns troubles him, but he does not let them bother him too much, since the community’s emphasis on politeness makes it easy for Jonas to conceal or ignore these little differences. Like any child in the community, Jonas is uncomfortable with the attention he receives when he is singled out as the new Receiver, preferring to blend in with his friends. Once Jonas begins his training with the Giver, however, the tendencies he showed in his earlier life; his sensitivity, his heightened perceptual powers, his kindness to and interest in people, his curiosity about new experiences, his honesty, and his high intelligence—make him extremely absorbed in the memories the Giver has to transmit. In turn, the memories, with their rich sensory and emotional experiences, enhance all of Jonas’s unusual qualities. Within a year of training, he becomes extremely sensitive to beauty, pleasure, and suffering, deeply loving toward his family and the Giver, and fiercely passionate about his new beliefs and feelings. Things about the community that used to be mildly perplexing or troubling are now intensely frustrating or depressing, and Jonas’s inherent concern for others and desire for justice makes him yearn to make changes in the community, both to awaken other people to the richness of life and to stop the casual cruelty that is practiced in the community. Jonas is also very determined, committing to a task fully when he believes in it and willing to risk his own life for the sake of the people he loves. The Giver; Like Jonas, who is a young person with the wisdom of an old person, the Giver is a bit of a paradox. He looks ancient, but he is not old at all. Like someone who has seen and done many things over many years, he is very wise and world-weary, and he is haunted by memories of suffering and pain, but in reality his life has been surprisingly uneventful. In the world of the community, the Giver has spent most of his life inside his comfortable living quarters, eating his meals and emerging occasionally to take long walks. Yet he carries the memories of an entire community, so he feels like a man who has done more in his life than anyone else in the world: he has experienced the positive and negative emotions, desires, triumphs, and failures of millions of men and women, as well as animals. He is responsible for preserving those memories and using the wisdom they give him to make decisions for the community. Anyone would feel weighted down by this enormous responsibility, and because the Giver is forbidden to share his knowledge and pain with anyone else, including his spouse and his children, the weight is more difficult to bear. Thus, the Giver has become an exceptionally patient, quiet, deliberate person, growing resigned to the fact that he cannot change the community even though he realizes that it needs to be changed. He endures his loneliness and frustration as well as the increasing physical pain that the memories bring him with a quiet calm that makes him a rather stoic figure. His patience, wisdom, and restraint make him an excellent teacher and mentor. Joan’s Father; Jonas’s father is one of the only characters in the novel, besides the Giver and Jonas, who seems to grapple with difficult decisions and complex emotions. Although Jonas’s father does not have access to the memories that give Jonas and the Giver insight into human relationships and feelings, he displays many of the characteristics that were valued in pre-Sameness societies. As a Nurturer, he feels a strong connection with the babies he cares for and a deep concern for their welfare. Although he agrees with Jonas’s mother that “love” is a meaningless, obscure word, the feelings he displays toward the new children and his family seem very much like love: he delights in taking care of them and playing with them, he worries about them, and he makes minor and major sacrifices for their benefit, from indulging his daughter’s fondness for her comfort object to bringing baby Gabriel home to his family every night in the hopes of saving him from being released. His concern for the new children might be concern about his own personal failure as a Nurturer, but he obviously feels pain and regret when children are released. He also has an independent streak that is unusual in the community, demonstrated when he breaks a rule and peeks at Gabriel’s name in the hopes that it will help the child. In the end, however, Jonas’s father is a product of his society. Under other circumstances, he probably would have loved the new children passionately and fought against all odds for their survival. But having grown up in a society where release, though an occasion for sadness, is not considered tragedy, Jonas’s father cannot access the deeper feelings that might be available to him. He regrets the release of new children, but he performs releases himself: not knowing the value of life as Jonas does, he cannot appreciate its loss, and never having felt intense pain, he cannot summon it for the death of a baby. The Giver is told in third-person limited, however, it is told from Joan’s point of view. The plot is moved by the actions that take place as Jonas realizes that his world is not perfect. Three important events are (1) when Jonas is selected to be the new Receiver, (2) when Jonas sees his first release, (3) and when Jonas makes it to Elsewhere. The plot of the “The Giver” is an eleven-year-old boy living in a futuristic society that has eliminated all pain, fear, war, and hatred. There is no prejudice, since everyone looks and acts basically the same, and there is very little competition. Everyone is unfailingly polite. The society has also eliminated choice: at age twelve every member of the community is assigned a job based on his or her abilities and interests. Citizens can apply for and be assigned compatible spouses, and each couple is assigned exactly two children each. The children are born to Birthmothers, who never see them, and spend their first year in a Nurturing Center with other babies, or “new children,” born that year. When their children are grown, family units dissolve and adults live together with Childless Adults until they are too old to function in the society. Then they spend their last years being cared for in the House of the Old until they are finally “released” from the society. In the community, release is death, but it is never described that way; most people think that after release, flawed new children and joyful elderly people are welcomed into the vast expanse of Elsewhere that surrounds the communities. Citizens who break rules or fail to adapt properly to the society’s codes of behavior are also released, though in their cases it is an occasion of great shame. Everything is planned and organized so that life is as convenient and pleasant as possible. Jonas lives with his father, a Nurturer of new children, his mother, who works at the Department of Justice, and his seven-year-old sister Lily. The events that lead to the high point on the story is at the beginning of the novel, he is apprehensive about the upcoming Ceremony of Twelve, when he will be given his official Assignment as a new adult member of the community. He does not have a distinct career preference, although he enjoys volunteering at a variety of different jobs. Though he is a well-behaved citizen and a good student, Jonas is different: he has pale eyes, while most people in his community have dark eyes, and he has unusual powers of perception. Sometimes objects “change” when he looks at them. He does not know it yet, but he alone in his community can perceive flashes of color; for everyone else, the world is as devoid of color as it is of pain, hunger, and inconvenience. At the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas is given the highly honored Assignment of Receiver of Memory. The Receiver is the sole keeper of the community’s collective memory. When the community went over to Sameness it’s and mostly emotionless state of tranquility and harmony it abandoned all memories of pain, war, and emotion, but the memories cannot disappear totally. Someone must keep them so that the community can avoid making the mistakes of the past, even though no one but the Receiver can bear the pain. Jonas receives the memories of the past, good and bad, from the current Receiver, a wise old man who tells Jonas to call him the Giver. The conflict of the story is that once Jonas starts receiving the memories he starts to realize that his community is not perfect. The Giver transmits memories by placing his hands on Jonas’s bare back. The first memory he receives is of an exhilarating sled ride. As Jonas receives memories from the Giver—memories of pleasure and pain, of bright colors and extreme cold and warm sun, of excitement and terror and hunger and love—he realizes how bland and empty life in his community really is. The memories make Jonas’s life richer and more meaningful, and he wishes that he could give that richness and meaning to the people he loves. But in exchange for their peaceful existence, the people of Jonas’s community have lost the capacity to love him back or to feel deep passion about anything. Since they have never experienced real suffering, they also cannot appreciate the real joy of life, and the life of individual people seems less precious to them. In addition, no one in Jonas’s community has ever made a choice of his or her own. Jonas grows more and more frustrated with the members of his community, and the Giver, who has felt the same way for many years, encourages him. The two grow very close, like a grandfather and a grandchild might have in the days before Sameness, when family members stayed in contact long after their children were grown. Meanwhile, Jonas is helping his family take care of a problem new child, Gabriel, who has trouble sleeping through the night at the Nurturing Center. Jonas helps the child to sleep by transmitting soothing memories to him every night, and he begins to develop a relationship with Gabriel that mirrors the family relationships he has experienced through the memories. When Gabriel is in danger of being released, the Giver reveals to Jonas that release is the same as death. Jonas’s rage and horror at this revelation inspire the Giver to help Jonas devise a plan to change things in the community forever. The Giver tells Jonas about the girl who had been designated the new Receiver ten years before. She had been the Giver’s own daughter, but the sadness of some of the memories had been too much for her and she had asked to be released. When she died, all of the memories she had accumulated were released into the community, and the community members could not handle the sudden influx of emotion and sensation. The Giver and Jonas plan for Jonas to escape the community and to actually enter Elsewhere. Once he has done that, his larger supply of memories will disperse, and the Giver will help the community to come to terms with the new feelings and thoughts, changing the society forever. However, Jonas is forced to leave earlier than planned when his father tells him that Gabriel will be released the next day. Desperate to save Gabriel, Jonas steals his father’s bicycle and a supply of food and sets off for Elsewhere. Gradually, he enters a landscape full of color, animals, and changing weather, but also hunger, danger, and exhaustion. Avoiding search planes, Jonas and Gabriel travel for a long time until heavy snow makes bike travel impossible. Half-frozen, but comforting Gabriel with memories of sunshine and friendship, Jonas mounts a high hill. There he finds a sled, the sled from his first transmitted memory, waiting for him at the top. Jonas and Gabriel experience a glorious downhill ride on the sled. Ahead of them, they see or think they see the twinkling lights of a friendly village at Christmas, and they hear music. Jonas is sure that someone is waiting for them there. There are several themes displayed in the story, such as, the importance of the individual and the importance of memory. Lowry was inspired to write The Giver after a visit to her aging father, who had lost most of his long-term memory. She realized that without memory, there is no pain, if you cannot remember physical pain, you might as well not have experienced it, and you cannot be plagued by regret or grief if you cannot remember the events that hurt you. At some point in the past the community in The Giver decided to eliminate all pain from their lives. To do so, they had to give up the memories of their society’s collective experiences. Not only did this allow them to forget all of the pain that had been suffered throughout human history, it also prevented members of the society from wanting to engage in activities and relationships that could result in conflict and suffering, and eliminated any nostalgia for the things the community gave up in order to live in total peace and harmony. According to the novel, however, memory is essential. The Committee of Elders does recognize the practical applications of memory, if you do not remember your errors, you may repeat them, and so it designates a Receiver to remember history for the community. But as Jonas undergoes his training, he learns that just as there is no pain without memory, there is also no true happiness. But the major theme to me is diversity. Diversity and how importance differences in others are. The genre is science fiction/fantasy.
The style of the story is told in chapters. There are 23 chapters in this story. Lowry uses direct, simple language with very few figures of speech or ironic comments (though Jonas and the Giver make ironic statements.) The simplicity of the language is appropriate for Lowry’s audience, children between eleven and fifteen, but it also echoes the “precision of language” demanded by Jonas’s community. Despite the simplicity, the tone is somewhat elevated, suited to the nature of Jonas’s discoveries about the richness of life. I think this would be a wonderful book for young adult’s grade 7th and above to read. Over all I think this was a great book to read even as an adult. The premise of living a life without agency is something to think about. I can't tell you how often I have wished for a world filled with only peace and happiness, where no one feels pain, hunger or sadness. This book made me seriously re-think that wish and realize-once and for all-that without feeling the depths of sadness, we can't truly know what happiness is. I think this is an amazing story. This is a really interesting book and a great book for discussions. There is the sameness of the community, the regimented lives of the citizens, and the lack of choice in everything they do and the release of people from the community. I thought Jonas's story was one many could relate to; he really grew up and into himself in the book. He learned to think and act for himself and as an adult. I did find that when I finished the book I wanted to know more though. I wanted to know how they created the sameness -- do they genetically engineer all the people to be color blind? The colors are still there obviously but the people just don't see them. How did they get rid of the weather, the sun, the hills, the animals? I assume they have climate control, but they aren't under a dome or anything so how does it work? Overall this is a good book to read, I would like to see this book displayed as a movie.