realises was actually a compliment on her hair, saying “it’s pretty”. Lowry says that this moment of miscommunication was an extremely important memory for her. She says: “Perhaps this is where the river starts”, meaning that in her use of the river as a metaphor for her life and the origins of The Giver, this could be the oldest memory which eventually led to the book being written.
In the mid-1950s Lois is at college. She remembers how she and the other girls in the dorm (shared student accommodation) were all basically alike – they dressed and behaved the same, they had the same habits and routines and style. One girl was different, however, “somehow alien, and that makes us uncomfortable”. Lois and her friends are unsure how to deal with someone who is different, so “we react with a kind of mindless cruelty … we ignore her. We pretend that she doesn’t exist. … Somehow, by shutting her out, we make ourselves feel comfortable, familiar, safe.” She describes this memory, which returns to her again and again over the years and which is “profoundly remorseful”, as being another tributary entering the growing river.
The face of the painter on the cover of the US anniversary edition.
© Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
In 1979 Lois is working as a journalist and is sent to write an article about a painter who lives on a remote island off the coast of Maine. In talking to the painter she learns that his capacity for seeing colour is much greater than her own. She takes a photograph of him which she keeps above her desk. Years later she learns that he has gone blind. She wishes at times “that he could have somehow magically given me the capacity to see the way he did”. This is evidently a key moment in the development of the idea which became The Giver.
In 1989 she goes to Germany because one of her sons is getting married there. The ceremony is in German, which she doesn’t understand, but one section is in English, and she reflects on how “we are all each other’s people now”. The sense of community and oneness, Sameness, even, is present here in this memory: “Can you feel that this memory, too, is a stream that is now entering the river?”
Later, her father is in his late 80s and in a nursing home. He is surrounded by photographs of his family, and at one point he points to Lois’ older sister Helen, who had died very young of cancer, and says that he can’t remember what happened to her. “We can forget pain, I think. And it is comfortable to do so. But I also wonder briefly: is it safe to do that, to forget? That uncertainty pours itself into the river of thoughts which will become the book.”
In 1991 she is giving a talk about her book Number the Stars (about the Holocaust) and a woman in the audience asks her “Why do we have to tell this Holocaust thing over and over? Is it really necessary?” She replies to the woman by quoting her German daughter-in-law, who says: “No one knows better than we Germans that we must tell this again and again.” But later, Lowry says, she played Devil’s advocate by asking herself; wouldn’t it actually be “a more comfortable world” if the Holocaust was forgotten? “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.” This is another key to the growth of the story and themes of The Giver.
The next memory is of her having lunch with her daughter in a pub. A news story comes on the TV about a mass shooting incident having just occurred: when she hears that it’s in another state, far away from where they’re sitting, she’s relieved. Her daughter is shocked by her reaction. “How comfortable I made myself feel for a moment, by reducing my own realm of caring to my own familiar neighbourhood. How safe I deluded myself into feeling.” This is another important tributary to the river, which is “turbulent by now, and clogged with memories and thoughts and ideas that begin to mesh and intertwine. The river begins to seek a place to spill over.”
These are the memories that Lowry identified as having contributed to the creation of the book. It is worth remembering that for most of the time period covered here, with the exception of her childhood, she was working as a professional writer: she was writing and publishing stories the whole time, and while doing so, over many, many years, this one story was growing and becoming more complex and full in the back of her mind.
We can see here how she has arrived at the heart of the book, the whole point about the dangers of Sameness and Jonas’s understanding that denying negatives automatically means denying positives – no rain, no sun, no grief, no joy.
The next point Lois Lowry makes is about the ambiguous ending to the book. Remember that this speech was given years before she started writing the sequels to The Giver, which necessarily push the ending of the book in one firm direction. She mentions several different interpretations of the ending which readers had told her about. She says that some have seen it as being a “circular journey. The truth that we go out and come back, and that what we have come back to is changed, and so are we. Perhaps I have been travelling in a circle too”.[12]
She then talks about what her circular journey has been. She says “Here are the things I’ve come back to”, and lists:
Her daughter, who had been so horrified by her reaction to the mass shooting, was the first person to read the manuscript of The Giver.
The “different” girl from college is happily living with another woman now.
Her son and German daughter-in-law now have a daughter, “who will be the receiver of all of their memories”.
The photograph she took of the old painter she interviewed who went blind was used as the cover for the first edition of the book in the USA (see p. 26).
| 3.2 | Summaries |
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
The Giver is organised in 23 numbered chapters. The book is short, so the chapters are also quite compact. Here is a brief synopsis of the major events and developments in each chapter, with the page number of the beginning of the chapter provided.
The first seven chapters can be treated as a kind of introduction to this strange world.
The plot begins in chapter eight, when Jonas is selected as the new Receiver of Memory.
We will look more at the structure and organisation of the narrative of The Giver in the chapter in this study guide on 3.3 Structure (p. 42).
1 (p. 9)
Jonas is nearly 12 years old. He is returning home on his bicycle. At home he has dinner with his family (parents and younger sister Lily) and they go through a ritual of talking in turn about their feelings. He is feeling apprehensive about the approaching Ceremony of Twelve.
2 (p. 16)
At dinner, Jonas’ father reminisces about his own childhood and tells Jonas what he can expect from the coming Ceremony of Twelve.
3 (p. 23)
Jonas’ father brings a baby home to care for, one with pale eyes like Jonas. Lily is excited and talks about potential Assignments. Jonas recalls an incident at school where he had been publicly shamed for taking an apple, and thinks about why the apple had caught his attention: he had seen it change in some way he can’t describe while he and
