Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > The Giver

*******SPOILER ALERT*******

“I don't know what you mean when you say 'the whole world' or 'generations before him.'I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”


Read the book, watch the movie, experience the synergy.

We don’t live in a dystopian world, but we do have a growing number of our population who believe that all that exists is NOW, that history is irrelevant, and that there is no future. It simplifies existence when a person can convince themselves of this. No need to learn about the past, no need to think about tomorrow, they just react to what they have to do today.

I insist on being a more complicated creature. What I learn about the past helps me make decisions about the present. The dreams I have for the future influence my decisions in the NOW. The past, the NOW, and the future all mingle together with very little delineation.

Reading this novel, experiencing this future society, my nerves were as jangled as if Freddy was running his metal tipped fingers down a chalkboard over and over again. That is not Lois Lowry’s fault it had much more to do with my natural abhorrence for everything and everyone being the same.

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

When Jonas turns twelve he, like every other twelve year old, is assigned his life’s work. He is delegated to the ancient, wise, old man called The Receiver. Because Jonas is now The Receiver, the old man by definition becomes The Giver. He is the vault, the keeper of memories, the only person in the community that knows there was a past. Jonas is understandably confused, overwhelmed with the concept of anything other than NOW.

Jonas is seeing red. In a monochrome society devoid of color, it is the equivalent of seeing a UFO or a Yeti. Color changes everything. As The Giver lays hands on him, transferring more and more memories to Jonas, he starts to see the world as so much more. Color creates depth, not only visually, but also mentally. Jonas’s expectations increase exponentially, quickly. He wants everybody to know what he knows, but of course that is impossible, most assuredly dangerous.

“They were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrancy his own was taking on. And he was angry at himself, that he could not change that for them.”

SAMENESS eliminates pain, discrimination, desire, pride, ambition, choice, thinking, and all the other things that make us uniquely human. To eliminate bad things also requires an equal measure of a loss of good things. In making this society the holes in the strainer were just too small.

The Elders select your mate for you (no homosexuality allowed in this society), but then with the elimination of desire, by a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals, it doesn’t really matter if one is gay, straight, or pansexual. Your mate is really just a partner, someone to schedule your life with. Children are assigned to you. They are nurtured by others until they are walking, and then like the stork of old they are plopped into a family unit. Two children only per couple. Women are assigned for childbearing, but only for three children, and then they are relegated as laborers for the rest of their lives. Childbearing is looked on as one of the lowest assignments a woman can be given. The Elders decide what job you will have for the rest of your life, well up until you are RELEASED.

No decisions necessary...ever.

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”

The Giver, his mind not as elastic as it used to be, is consumed by the pain of the memories. He needs to speed up the process of passing some of that distress to Jonas. For the first time in his life Jonas feels real discomfort. Pills in the past had always taken away any pain he felt, from a skinned knee or even a broken arm. As The Receiver he has to understand the source of the pain, and to do so he must feel it.

There was another Receiver. She had asked to be Released. A more than niggling concern to young Jonas.

Even though the rule for The Receiver, You May Lie, bothers Jonas, it becomes readily apparent the more he learns the more imperative that rule becomes. The veil has been lifted from his eyes, and it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. He must choose the path that his predecessor chose ( to be released), or he must go into the great beyond of ELSEWHERE which is anywhere but there. The Giver has had to be so courageous, staying, holding memories for everyone, bearing the annoyance of only being consulted in moments of desperation, knowing so much that could be so helpful, and yet, made to feel like a dusty museum piece with the placard stating: Only Break Glass in Case of Fire.

The conclusion really bothers people, but I consider the ambiguous ending as one of my most favorite parts of the book. For those who read the books Choose Your Own Adventure, this is a Choose Your Own Ending. Pessimists and optimists seem to choose according to their natural preference for a glass half empty or a glass half full. I was struck by an odd parallel between the ending of Ethan Frome and the ending of this book. Only, being an optimist, I of course chose a very different result than the finale of Ethan Frome.

If your children have read this book or are currently reading this book, do read it. The language is by design simplistic. The concepts though are much larger, and you will enjoy your discussions with your children. This is a perfect opportunity to slip in some of your own brainwashing by including some of your own views of our current society into the dialogue.

In an attempt to make Eden they produced a Hell.

I kept thinking as I read it of the culling and the brutality that had to occur to gain this much control over human beings. I most certainly would have been RELEASED in the first wave. Compared to a future like this, we are living in a PARADISE. With all our issues, we still have choice. We have color. We have desire. We have ambition. We have a past, a future, and a present. We are not drugged zombies (well most of us, well some of us). We can read a book and see the world from another’s perspective. We can choose our mate, as dicey as that seems for most people. We can have a child, if we choose, who will be The Receiver of our collective memories and in the process we gain another generation of immortality.

Regardless of how everyone feels about this book, I would hope that most people come away from reading it feeling a little better about life as it is now, and also realize the importance of a remembered past and a hopeful future.

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