The Giver (The Giver, #1)

by Lois Lowry

We thank you for your childhood.”

what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?

“You’re beginning to see the color red.”

Once, back in the time of the memories, everything had a shape and size, the way things still do, but they also had a quality called color.

“Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences.” He thought for a moment. “We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”

“It’s safer.”

they don’t want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable—so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen.”

“Why do you and I have to hold these memories?”

“It gives us wisdom,” The Giver replied. “Without wisdom I could not fulfill my function of advising the Committee of Elders when they call upon me.”

“The Committee of Elders sought my advice,” The Giver said. “It made sense to them, too, but it was a new idea, and they came to me for wisdom.”

“Do you remember the day when the plane flew over the community?”

He wondered, though, if he should confess to The Giver that he had given a memory away. He was not yet qualified to be a Giver himself; nor had Gabriel been selected to be a Receiver.

That he had this power frightened him. He decided not to tell.

Jonas did not want to go back. He didn’t want the memories, didn’t want the honor, didn’t want the wisdom, didn’t want the pain. He wanted his childhood again, his scraped knees and ball games. He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden.

Jonas repeated it. “Love.” It was a word and concept new to him.

“Do you love me?”

“Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete,” his mother explained carefully.

“And of course our community can’t function smoothly if people don’t use precise language. You could ask, ‘Do you enjoy me?’ The answer is ‘Yes,’” his mother said.

“Or,” his father suggested, “‘Do you take pride in my accomplishments?’ And the answer is wholeheartedly ‘Yes.’”

There was no answer to Jonas’s whisper. Gabriel was sound asleep.

Gabriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.

The next morning, for the first time, Jonas did not take his pill. Something within him, something that had grown there through the memories, told him to throw the pill away.

He had not taken the pills, now, for four weeks. The Stirrings had returned, and he felt a little guilty and embarrassed about the pleasurable dreams that came to him as he slept. But he knew he couldn’t go back to the world of no feelings that he had lived in so long.

The Giver was still deep in thought. After a moment, he said, “If you floated off in the river, I suppose I could help the whole community the way I’ve helped you. It’s an interesting concept. I need to think about it some more. Maybe we’ll talk about it again sometime. But not now.

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

Wouldn’t it, I think, playing devil’s advocate to myself, make for a more comfortable world to forget the Holocaust? And I remember once again how comfortable, familiar, and safe my parents had sought to make my childhood by shielding me from Elsewhere. But I remember, too, that my response had been to open the gate again and again. My instinct had been a child’s attempt to see for myself what lay beyond the wall.

When Jonas meets The Giver for the first time and tries to comprehend what lies before him, he says, in confusion, “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”

In beginning to write The Giver, I created—as I always do, in every book—a world that existed only in my imagination—the world of “only us, only now.” I tried to make Jonas’s world seem familiar, comfortable, and safe, and I tried to seduce the reader. I seduced myself along the way. It did feel good, that world. I got rid of all the things I fear and dislike, all the violence, prejudice, poverty, and injustice, and I even threw in good manners as a way of life because I liked the idea of it.