Snapshot
Would we be comfortable living in a world where there are no conflicts, no inequality, no divorce, no unemployment, no injustice, but also no personal choices?
In The Giver by Lois Lowry, Jonas, a twelve-year-old boy, finds himself asking the flip side of this question, as he has just discovered these concepts for the first time in a dystopian world where they don’t exist at all.
Jonas hesitated. “I certainly liked the memory, though. I can see why it’s your favorite. I couldn’t quite get the word for the whole feeling of it, the feeling that was so strong in the room.” “Love,” The Giver told him. Jonas repeated it. “Love.” It was a word and concept new to him. (page 157)
Summary and Review
It’s not every day that you get to the halfway point of a book and think, “I wish this book was longer.”
This is one of those rare books.
There are ideas we don’t even dare to think about, let alone talk about, because they shake the foundations we live by. In the giver, Lois Lowry challenges those norms, lifts them up, shakes the dirt off of them, analyzes them, and then puts them back.
Now, all of a sudden, we’re much more comfortable revisiting ideas that used to feel…taboo.
This book can really change you if you’re willing to sit in those uncomfortable spaces. But, evidently, not everyone is. That’s why people still write to Lowry saying things like, “Jesus would be ashamed of you.”
“A book is almost sacred: such a singular and private thing,” Lowry says. “There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat.” And I get that, because unlike some who absolutely hated this book, I loved it. The writing is simple, easy to follow, but it delivers a big, important idea to a wide audience. The fact that she still gets fifty to sixty letters a day, praising the book, even twenty years later, proves this point.
In the story, Jonas, a twelve-year-old, lives in a dystopian colony where everyone has left behind all differences, even inside themselves. No conflict, no inequality, no divorce, no unemployment, no injustice, no personal choices. The brutal, painful, past is gone, except for one person, The Receiver, who holds all the memories of the old world. Jonas has just been chosen for that role. He is the next in line.
The people who have no knowledge of the old world find it easy not to ‘not follow’ the rules. But, for a “A Receiver”, it’s significantly harder because their rational mind has been somewhat restored from the memories of the old world. The community expects the ‘ideal’ Receiver to work against their own rationale, but that doesn’t make their life any easier. And Jonas is too humanly fragile to hold down that constrained rationality.
The most important message, in my opinion, that the author is trying to bring across here is alarming, because it’s both serious and relevant in the world we live in. Although the ending of the story offers some hope, the fact that the world collectively agreed to such a dystopia is horrifying. This shows that the book delivers a more rational message than an optimistic one. Because the people who thought this kind of system would work, WON. Even though these ideas seem too utopian to be true, we find some of them surfacing in today’s world.
But, we are just too close to the elephant, so we do not see one. At least not yet.
Ideas that resonate with me
It’s easy to reject this dystopian world’s ideals.
After all, there’s barely any overlap between their world and ours. Theirs is far more oppressive.
That reasoning might be right, but it also creates a kind of bias.
What if, just for a minute, I look at this dystopian world on its own terms, without comparing it to ours? Would I agree with any of its ideals?
Well… there is one conversation in the book that I actually found reasonable. When I first read it, I caught myself thinking, “Well… that’s not entirely false.”
“Do you love me?” There was an awkward silence for a moment.
Then Father gave a little chuckle. Jonas. You, of all people. Precision of language, please!”
“What do you mean?” Jonas asked.
Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated. “Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete,” his mother explained carefully.
Just because a word isn’t precise doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. It just means it means different things to different people.
But it creates conflict.
Lowry is being very clever here, using the word “love” to show how extreme conflicts can get.
But if we replaced “love” with, say, “equality,” don’t we see people debate that word every day, and have been doing so for centuries?
For some, it’s equality of outcome that matters. For others, it’s equality of input.
In other words, we don’t have the same definition for the same word sometimes. This is why some conflicts never end.
So, if we don’t want to find ourselves rejecting a word like “love” just because it’s not precise—which, of course, we don’t—then it becomes incredibly important to agree on definitions before debating anything.
Parts that left a mark on me
“I felt sad today,” he had heard his mother say, and they had comforted her. But now Jonas had experienced real sadness. He had felt grief. He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those. These were deeper, and they did not need to be told. They were felt.(166)
From a 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. (page 151)
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. (page 225)
How did the book change the way I think?
The compromise to create a “perfect” society, where there’s no conflict about anything, is losing individuality, and with it, a part of our humanity.
Coffee chat
Summarize The Giver by Lois Lowry in one paragraph, including its dystopian setting and main conflict.
In the story, Jonas, a twelve-year-old boy, lives in a dystopian community where everyone has erased their differences, even within themselves. No conflict. No inequality. No divorce. No unemployment. No injustice and no personal choices.
Jonas is chosen for one of the most important roles in this tightly controlled society: to be the Receiver. He’s the only person allowed to hold the memories of the forgotten world: a world that was chaotic, painful, but also had individual freedom.
The more Jonas receives these memories, the more distant he grows from his own community. He begins to feel , a word that doesn’t even exist in this dystopian world.
By the end of the book, Jonas makes his choice. He breaks free, leaving behind the comfort of control to search for something far more dangerous—his freedom.
What does the title The Giver mean in Lois Lowry’s novel?
The book revolves around two main characters, the Giver and the Receiver.
In this dystopian future, peace is maintained by force, and individuality has no meaning. The Giver is the only person allowed to remember the world as it once was, a world where people lived freely, felt deeply, and moved between happiness and pain.
When his time comes, the Giver must pass on this knowledge to the next in line, the Receiver.
Why does Jonas stop taking the pills and question his community in The Giver?
The pills keep people away from awareness.
But as Jonas learns more about the past and begins to feel real emotions, he wants more of it. Now that he understands ideas like reasoning and choice, concepts completely foreign to his own world, he starts to question everything. Why take the pills? Why limit awareness at all?
That curiosity pushes him to stop taking them. From that point on, Jonas goes all in, choosing to learn, to feel, and to value reason and choice over blind obedience.
What is “release” in the society of The Giver and why is it so significant?
“Release” just means execution.
The word sounds gentle, but the act is anything but. It shows how deeply constrained this dystopian world really is. There’s no free will, no individuality, no tolerance for difference. In a society where everyone must be the same, the cost of Sameness is literal death.
There’s no middle ground.
How do memory and emotion shape the theme of The Giver?
In this dystopian world, people chose to give up both memory and emotion for the sake of societal stability.
But in doing so, they lose the capacity for joy, love, and individuality.
The book makes us think: Is it really worth it?
What is the deeper meaning of the ending of The Giver?
At the end of the story, fed up with the constrained world he lives in, Jonas breaks free.
This feels like the best choice to us as readers. He escapes, hoping to find a world more like the one we live in.
But if we remove that bias, what does this escape really tell us?
There are two ways to look at it:
We could assume he just likes “change”. Who doesn’t?
Or, looking more closely at his situation, the core message of the book is that individuality matters far more than collective social stability, even if it brings chaotic outcomes like war, fear, and uncertainty.
Explain why Jonas chooses to leave the community in The Giver and what this says about his character.
The people who have no knowledge of the old world find it easy not to ‘not follow’ the rules. But, for a “A Receiver”, it’s significantly harder because their rational mind has been somewhat restored from the memories of the old world. The community expects the ‘ideal’ Receiver to work against their own rationale, but that doesn’t make their life any easier. And Jonas is too humanly fragile to hold down that constrained rationality.
Compare the society in The Giver with our own: how does the suppression of memory and choice affect freedom?
It’s easy to assume, when reading this book, that we live in a much better world.
For the most part, that’s true.
But if we strip away the extremes of this dystopian world, we start to see familiar edges of our own world within it.
Of course, we need some constraints to survive as a pack, as a society.
As Karl Marx put it, freedom is a recognized necessity.
But, it’s important to be conscious about where we define the boundary, to create a balance between individual freedom and the collective growth of society.
Describe how the author uses symbols (such as color and memory) in The Giver to communicate the theme.
Lois Lowry’s dystopian world is monochromatic, not just metaphorically but literally. People cannot see color; they are genetically engineered to see only black and white.
Also, people have been stripped of knowledge of the old world, a world similar to the one we live in.
This symbolizes the suppression of human emotion.
Explore the moral dilemmas in The Giver: is the community’s pursuit of “sameness” justified or fundamentally flawed?
The compromise to make a “perfect” society, where there’s no conflict about anything, is losing individuality, and with it, a part of our humanity.
As Buddha said, “the middle is the way.”
“Avoid both extremes. Indulgence in sensual pleasure and self-mortification for both are unworthy. The Tathāgata has discovered the Middle Way, which gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to peace, direct knowledge, enlightenment, and Nibbāna.” – Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11)
In other words, one extreme is self-indulgence, chasing pleasure, comfort, desire. The other extreme is self-denial, punishing yourself, suffering for its own sake. The Middle Way is the balance: living mindfully, with moderation and wisdom, neither clinging to pleasure nor rejecting life’s realities.