“I picked up The Giver on a whim toward the end of elementary school. The cover image of a bearded old man wasn’t initially promising, yet that image kept coming back to me until I was finally overwhelmed with curiosity.” — Warren Zhang
Lois Lowry’s The Giver is basically baby’s first dystopian fiction, but that’s not meant as a slight against this epic work. It’s a book with that remarkable ability to reach kids — literature that’s perfectly comprehensible for the young without talking down to them.
The first time I read The Giver, I fell for the trap, hook, line and sinker. My thought process went a little something like this:
Dum dee dum, oh well isn’t this the very model of an enlightened society? What’s this, a career path carved out in stone for all of the community’s children? Well, if they’re happy, I guess that’s OK.
Wait, there are no emotions in this world? Wait, there’s no color in this world?
Wait … releasing means euthanasia? This utopia sucks.
As a kid, I didn’t particularly love novels. My literary diet consisted mostly of Magic Tree House and, honestly, didn’t evolve much beyond that until I was nearly in middle school. Sure, I read a fair number of more challenging books for class, but nothing within them made much of an impression, with few and fleeting exceptions.
I picked up The Giver on a whim toward the end of elementary school. The cover image of a bearded old man wasn’t initially promising, yet that image kept coming back to me until I was finally overwhelmed with curiosity.
Some concepts (and many words) initially flew over my head. No, I did not get that whole business about the main character Jonas having wet dreams after forgoing sex drive suppressants. But the ideas about individualism, about putting personal and creative expression above utilitarian goals, hit me hard.
The community’s habit of assigning careers and tightly modulating emotions seemed, on the surface, to be not necessarily a bad thing until Lowry slowly pulled the rug out from under me.
About the time Jonas found out what releasing truly meant, I began to wonder about what I wanted to do when I grew up and whether I actually liked the math and science my parents were subtly pushing me toward.
Growing up is such a weird and elusive process that pinpointing the exact moment it happens would be a fool’s errand. What I can say is that I read The Giver right around the time I stopped looking at the world through the boundlessly optimistic eyes of a child and starting questioning notions and things I once took for granted.
But, amid the sadness and the gloom, the book offers a moment of peculiar hope and reassurance. Of all the wonderful things about it, it’s the ending that most resonated with me.
The image of Jonas on that final snowy hill was incredibly evocative. It ended the story with closure, but also left enough ambiguity to allow my imagination to fill in the blanks.
Some of the magic was lost when I later read Gathering Blue and Messenger — the sequels that establish that Jonas did, in fact, survive after The Giver — but the initial ending still has a powerful hold on me.
Even though Jonas had lost everything he knew in his life, and even though his future was in terrible jeopardy, there would always be music in the world. Love, warmth and light.
