Summary
Jonas reports to the Annex of the House of the Old for
his first day of training. An Attendant admits him to the Receiver’s
living area, which is locked to ensure the Receiver’s privacy, even
though no one else in the community locks their doors. The living
area is more luxurious than average, and its walls are lined with
hundreds of thick, beautifully bound books, very different from
the three reference volumes (dictionary, community volume, Book
of Rules) available in every other household. Jonas cannot imagine
what could be inside them. He meets the Receiver, who greets him
as the new Receiver of Memory and tells him that although he, the
old Receiver, is not as old as he looks, he will need to use the
last of his strength to train Jonas. He says that the process involves
transmitting all of the memories he has of the past to Jonas. Jonas
wonders why listening to stories from the old man’s childhood is
so important that he cannot just do it in his spare time, leaving
him free to work at an adult job in the community. The Receiver
replies that the memories he will give Jonas are not just memories
from his childhood. They are the memories of the entire world, going
back through generations and generations of Receivers. These memories
of communities and worlds before Jonas’s community bring wisdom
and help the community to shape its future. The Receiver feels weighed
down by so many memories and compares the feeling to a sled slowing
down as it has to push against more and more accumulated snow.
Jonas does not understand the comparison, because he has
never seen snow or a sled. The Receiver decides to transmit the
memory of snow to him. He instructs Jonas to take off his tunic
and lie face-down on the bed. Then he goes to the speaker, which
is just like the speaker that transmits announcements in every house,
and turns it off, something that no one else in the community can
do. He places his hands on Jonas’s back, and Jonas begins to feel
the sensation of cold air, then of snowflakes touching his face.
He experiences the wonderful sensation of going downhill on a sled,
feeling the exhilaration of movement and speed even though he has
never felt snow or strong wind or even a hill. In his community,
all hills have been leveled to make transportation easier, and snow
disappeared with the onset of climate control that made agriculture
more efficient. When the experience is over, the Receiver tells
Jonas that the memory is a very distant one, from before the time
when “we went to Sameness.” Jonas says that he wishes snow and hills
still existed, and asks the Receiver why he does not use his great
power to bring them back. The Receiver answers that great honor
is not the same thing as great power. He then gives Jonas the memory
of sunshine, and Jonas perceives the word for “sunshine” at the
same time that he perceives the sensation of it. Afterward he asks
about the pain he will experience, and the Receiver gives him the
mild pain of a sunburn in order to get him used to the idea. Jonas
finds the experience interesting, if not pleasant. When he leaves,
he asks the Receiver what he should call him now that he, Jonas,
is the new Receiver. The Receiver, drained from their day’s work,
says to call him the Giver.
Analysis
The comparative luxury of the Giver’s living area reflects
his honored position in the community, but it also sets him apart:
he needs different surroundings in order to do his job. He spends
most of his life in the world of the past, so he probably craves
the sensual and aesthetic comforts that the pre-Sameness world valued.
His job also involves enduring pain, so as compensation his environment
is comfortable and luxurious. One of the luxuries seems to be his
enormous collection of books. Jonas cannot imagine what the books contain:
he only knows the three reference books his family owns. We realize
that Jonas has never read a book for pleasure, and this makes sense:
reading is a solitary, isolating pursuit. Sitting alone with a book
all day encourages people to draw too deeply into themselves rather
than participate in activities that help the community or strengthen
social bonds between community members.
The luxury of the Giver’s apartment and his extensive
library remind us of similar living quarters in other dystopian
novels, such as 1984 and Brave
New World. In these novels, most of the population lives
according to the dystopian community’s rules, foregoing individual
pursuits for the community’s gain, submitting to government surveillance,
and substituting group mentality for intellectual inquiry. But in
each novel, characters who are part of the elite classes ignore
the rules that they themselves helped to create, preferring the artifacts
of a culture they destroyed or rejected to the amusements of the
society they govern and maintain. This suggests that great works of
art, often inspired by passion, pain, and other disorderly influences,
are always powerful and relevant, even in societies that claim to
have gotten rid of passion and pain.
Although the Giver is not as hypocritical as the elite
characters in 1984 and Brave
New World—they read Shakespeare and Plato for their own
pleasure, while he uses his knowledge to help the community make
decisions—the Giver’s library and the Giver himself represent this
same idea in Lowry’s novel. Although the society has rejected the
powerful emotions and dangerous freedom of thought that produced
great works of art in the past, it cannot function without the wisdom
contained in those works or without the Giver’s wisdom. The fact
that books, memory, love, and pain must exist somewhere in the society,
even if they exist only in one room or in the mind of one man, shows
that these things are more valuable and timeless than Jonas’s community
would like to think. Humans cannot escape them.
When the Giver explains that snow, hills, and sleds all
vanished when the community went to Sameness, he gives a name to
Jonas’s society for the first time. We have already noticed that
everyone in the community strives to be the same, but applying the
term Sameness to the physical details of the environment as well
as to the behavior and psychology of the inhabitants helps to explain
the rationale behind the community philosophy. The hills have been leveled
and the climate controlled because it makes farming and transportation
more efficient and life much easier. Long ago, the same people who
made these decisions must have thought that life would be more efficient
if everyone looked and thought and dressed the same too: it was
a practical decision. At the same time, the physical Sameness
of the environment serves as a powerful metaphor for the emotional
and intellectual monotony of life in the community. There are no
extremes of cold or heat, no exhilarating sled rides or depressing moments.
The land is as flat and changeless as the inhabitants’ lives.
