The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Giver is a story that gets young adults thinking about social systems and the vital nature of choice in living full, flourishing lives.
The purpose of this Substack is to reflect on the ways fiction authors express their philosophical ideas in their works. Where possible, I will integrate those themes with other ideas and evaluate them. Though I may occasionally comment on various aspects of the writing, these articles are not reviews. For those who are unfamiliar with the works discussed, I will include the relevant details from the story in the “context” section, so if you are familiar with the work, I recommend you skip that section. I will try to avoid the most important spoilers, but there will be some, as it is often impossible to properly analyze the meaning of a story without accounting for how it ends.
Context
Imagine a world without color, holidays, art, pets, or weather; a world where everyone lives in the same kind of house and eats the same kind of food. This is the bleak dystopian landscape of The Giver, in which the government has instituted “Sameness” to create supposedly perfect equality between citizens. It strictly regulates people’s lives, from their daily schedules to what jobs they do to whom they marry. Children are brought up from a young age to obey and conform, so most do; repeat rulebreakers are “released,” meaning lethally injected.
Nobody can remember life being any different. There are no histories of any kind—except in the mind of The Receiver of Memory. In the world of The Giver, memories don’t cease to exist when a person dies; they would be passed to everyone, were it not for the government assigning them to one person per community—The Receiver—to receive them. And it is under this honored elder that Jonas, the protagonist, trains. Jonas becomes the new Receiver, learning from the elder (now called The Giver) what the world was once like by experiencing bits of it at a time as though he had been there. As he learns, Jonas must decide whether he agrees with the decision his government made to all but eliminate people’s freedom in order to “save” them from themselves—and if not, what to do about it.
Main Ideas:
Deep emotions are not possible without a substantial amount of choice.
Violating people’s right to choose results in a lose-lose situation.
History helps people understand their way of life.
Deep emotions are not possible without a substantial amount of choice
One of the explicit lessons Jonas learns is that in the world of Sameness, profound emotions—love, ecstasy, fury—are not possible. When someone has almost no control over how he lives, he has only two options: accept his state of affairs or rebel (which means “release”). This, in addition to the conditioning they receive from childhood and the medication that softens the natural effects of hormones, encourages most people to passively accept their lives and live in placid complacency.
But it goes deeper than that. Emotions are automatic reactions based on your values to events, objects, and actions. If something bad happens to a person you love, you feel sad or angry. If you reach a milestone in a career you care about, you feel joyful. In a world where you aren’t allowed to choose your own values—your spouse, your job, your hobbies, your clothing, your moral ideals—and where as little as possible changes, except pre-planned celebrations at standardized life milestones (such as receiving a bicycle at a certain age, retiring at a certain age, etc), there is not much to evoke such reactions. People will almost always feel minor annoyance at inconveniences or quiet satisfaction at a job well done. But since, in this universe, no one chooses anything significant in his life, no one ever feels the more striking or profound emotions, the ones that move us to tears or inspire us to do great things.
Jonas, through the memories he receives, starts to experience both the emotions that are missing from his and his friends’ lives—such as love, joy, pain, hunger, fear—and the things that cause them: grandparents, holidays, music, hatred, war. He comes to realize that it is choice that makes such things possible.
Violating people’s right to choose results in a lose-lose situation
Jonas learns that the government that implemented Sameness did so to “protect” people from bad decisions and their consequences, which can range from unhappiness and grief to war and famine. In other words, they had what, on the surface, appear to be good motives. But Jonas also sees the cost that such a system exacts—both on those who remember everything and those who are kept in the dark. The Receiver of Memories, for his part, has to bear the trauma and pain of centuries, and it takes its toll: “Some afternoons The Giver sent him away without training. Jonas knew, on days when he arrived to find The Giver hunched over, rocking his body slightly back and forth, his face pale, that he would be sent away. ‘Go,’ The Giver would tell him tensely. ‘I’m in pain today. Come back tomorrow’” (133). Such pain is difficult to bear, and Jonas’s predecessor wasn’t able to; she committed suicide, which is the only way to escape one’s assigned job in that society.
Nor is the situation better for the other members of the community. Though they don’t have the physical and emotional pain that Jonas and The Giver experience, other citizens also lack the positive experiences and the knowledge Receivers hold. The Giver is the only one in the community who listens to music, or who reads anything besides instructions or rulebooks. He will eventually pass his library and his most cherished memories with Jonas; in the meantime, he shares the knowledge of holidays, sun, sledding, color, and oceans. Not only are these things pleasurable in themselves, they show that life could be different; it could be fuller, more vibrant, more meaningful. That knowledge of an alternative is one totally denied to the rest of the community, most of whom can’t conceive of living another way.
Though the choice regarding memories is the most important one the book deals with, there are other choices the citizens don’t have, the absence of which results in negative outcomes. Consider being assigned a job. Though the government committee does its best to match candidates to work they’re well suited to, there’s no guarantee that they will choose correctly. And though a person can become competent in a field of work he didn’t choose, it’s rare that he will become passionate about that work. Passion facilitates excellence and innovation, as well as job satisfaction. So being forced into a particular job often results in poorer quality work than if people had been able to choose. Over and over again, The Giver shows that having one’s right to choose taken away leads to worse outcomes for the chooser and the rest of the community.
History helps people understand their way of life
Prior to receiving any memories, Jonas merely floated along through his life, not knowing anything else was possible, much less desirable. When he learned how the world had been before Sameness, he began to think through alternative ways of living. This broadened perspective helped him see that his life, like those of his fellow community members, was limited—as well as to genuinely comprehend the horrors (war, famine, disease) that the government was trying to protect people from. Only with all that knowledge could he make a meaningful decision about what was right.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley.1 History shows us the alternatives that have actually existed—the figures, the movements, the ideas, the social systems—and how they worked out. And though we can always wonder “what if?,” the story of our world is already chock full of lessons about the effects of ideas, actions, and systems—giving us myriad opportunities to compare historical circumstances to our own. Having that broadened perspective shows us that there are other options and helps us to trace the influences that have led us to where we are. So though The Receiver must deal with the trauma of generations, he also gains wisdom through a broadened perspective that others in his community lack. And by studying our own history, so can we.
Side Note
There is a movie adaptation of The Giver in which Jonas is a bit older and has more of a romance with his friend Fiona. Her involvement in his climactic decision, along with lots more action, are the most significant ways in which the film departs from the book. However, it still conveys most of the core ideas, albeit confusing them with multiple references to a vague notion of “faith” that doesn’t appear in the book.
Conclusion
The Giver is a story that gets young adults thinking about social systems and the vital nature of choice in living full, flourishing lives. It beautifully illustrates that the attempts to limit choice ultimately end up limiting our ability to experience deep emotion and understand or appreciate the way we live.
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (originally published 1953; republished by Penguin Books 2015).