Describe two times in the past when the Giver used his memories to advise the committee of elders

We really have to protect people from wrong choices.

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After Jonas receives his first memory, he finds that it is not too hard to obey the rules that come with his position. His family is used to his not dreaming frequently, so they do not question him much at dream-telling time. His friends are so busy describing their own training experiences that he can just sit still and listen, knowing that he could not even begin to explain what happens in his training. As they bicycle to the House of the Old together, he talks with his friend Fiona about her training as a Caretaker of the Old and notices her hair change the way the apple changed. At the Giver’s living space, Jonas tells him about the changes, wondering if that is what the Giver means by seeing beyond. The Giver says that for him, his first experiences with seeing beyond took a different form, one that Jonas would not understand yet. He asks Jonas to remember the sled from yesterday, and Jonas notices that the sled has the same strange quality as Fiona’s hair and the apple—it does not change as they did, it just has the quality. The Giver tells Jonas that he is beginning to see the color red, explaining that at one time everything in the world had color as well as shape and size. The reason that the sled is just red, instead of turning red, is that it is a memory from a time when color existed. Jonas remarks that red is beautiful and wonders why his community got rid of it, and the Giver tells him that in order to gain control of certain things, the society had to let go of others. Jonas says that they should not have done so, and the Giver tells Jonas that he is quickly acquiring wisdom.

As Jonas’s training progresses, he learns about all the different colors and begins to see them fleetingly in his daily life. He decides that it is unfair that nothing in his society has color—he wants to have the freedom to choose between things that are different. Then he realizes that if people had the power to make choices, they might make the wrong choices. It would be unsafe to allow people to choose their spouse or their job, but he still feels frustrated. He wishes his friends and family could see the world the way he sees it. He makes Asher stare at a flowerbed, hoping Asher will notice the colors, but Asher becomes uncomfortable. Another time, after the Giver transmits a memory of an elephant mourning the death of another elephant that was brutally killed by poachers, he tries to give the memory to Lily, hoping that she will understand that her toy elephant is a representation of something that was once real and majestic and awe-inspiring. It does not work.

Jonas’s training makes him curious. He asks if the Giver is allowed to have a spouse, and the Giver says that he did have a spouse once—now she lives with the Childless Adults, as almost all adults do when their children are grown and their family units have dissolved. The Giver tells him that being the Receiver makes family life difficult—Jonas will not be able to share his memories or books with his spouse or children. The Giver tells Jonas that his whole life will be nothing more than the memories he possesses. He occasionally will appear before the Committee of Elders to give them advice, but his primary function is to contain all the painful memories that the community cannot endure. When the new Receiver who was selected ten years before failed, all the memories she had received returned to the community, and the whole community suffered until the memories were assimilated. The Giver tells Jonas that his instructors know nothing, despite their scientific knowledge, because all of their knowledge is meaningless without the memories the Giver carries. Jonas notices that the Giver’s memories give him pain, and he wonders what causes it. He also wonders what lies Elsewhere, beyond his community. The Giver decides to give Jonas a memory of strong pain so that he can bear some of the Giver’s pain for him.

Analysis

Jonas’s alienation from his community intensifies as he begins to question the values with which he grew up. As his physical vision deepens and changes, allowing him to see the color red, his metaphorical vision also deepens and changes, allowing him to see how empty the lives of his friends and family are compared to his own. He tries to transmit the idea of color to Asher and the memory of elephants to Lily, but he fails: unlike Jonas, his friends are physically incapable of seeing color, and they have no reason to believe that elephants exist. Perhaps Jonas could give Asher and Lily these sensations if he could manage to touch their skin, but the rules and conventions of his society make that impossible. Physical nakedness becomes a metaphor for emotional bareness: Jonas’s friends cannot share his experience because their society makes them reluctant to show their bare skin, but it is equally impossible for them to show their bare emotions because they do not even know they have them. In order to share Jonas’s experience, Asher and Lily would need to trust him totally. They would need to be entirely open to the ideas he shared with them, and the society they have grown up in has made that kind of openness almost impossible. Jonas’s experiences with them foreshadow the Giver’s explanation, later in this section, that the Receiver cannot share his experiences and knowledge with his loved ones. It is forbidden, but it is also almost physically impossible.

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These chapters draw close connections between color and emotion—another example of Lowry’s use of physical imagery to symbolize deeper, nonphysical sensations. The memories that the Giver has transmitted to Jonas so far are mostly memories of the natural world or of solitary experiences, and yet Jonas is gaining a stronger sense of the complex emotions. When he tries to transmit the color red to Asher and the idea of an elephant to Lily, he is really trying to transmit the intense feelings of pleasure and surprise that the world of color has opened up to him or the sense of pity, awe, and love that he got from the relationship between the two elephants. When Jonas apologizes for hurting Lily with his efforts to make her understand what a real elephant is like, she answers with indifference: “’ccept your apology.” The contrast between her casual treatment of an apology—a social formula that was once an expression of real pain and regret—and Jonas’s emotional response to the elephants is strong, and illustrates that the members of Jonas’s community are immune to powerful feelings. Although the community insists on precision of language, many words in the society have lost the emotional resonance that was once so important to their meaning.

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When Jonas and the Giver discuss the reason that there are no colors in the community anymore, Jonas agrees with the Giver’s statement that “[w]e gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.” He is angry at first that the lack of color makes it difficult to exercise free choice, but when he realizes that being able to choose between a red jersey and a blue jersey might lead people to want to choose spouses and jobs, he concedes that people have to be protected from “wrong choices.” This principle explains the community’s extreme emphasis on Sameness: although choosing one color over another based on personal preference might seem innocent enough, it would be dangerous to the structure of Jonas’s community to allow people even the minor pleasure of making an aesthetic choice. In order to keep them from yearning for more and more personal freedom, the society must make the sensation of choice totally alien to the community members. This strict limitation of all choice indicates that the current state of the society is unnatural: drastic measures must be taken to maintain its artificial order, peace, and lack of personal liberty.

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The Giver’s attitude toward science, combined with the mysterious way in which the failed Receiver’s memories returned to plague the community, confirms the dichotomy we noticed earlier between the mystical, religious nature of memory and the logical order of the community and of Sameness. It is possible that Lowry chose to associate memory with magic and mystery in order to give her readers a stronger sense of how strange and inexplicable memory is for the members of the community. Since they have no experience with emotion, pain, history, or love, these ideas must seem as strange and improbable to them as magical powers seem to us. In our own world, where we acknowledge the existence of emotions, we still have trouble explaining human desires and behavior with science. In Jonas’s world, the significance of these forces are almost totally ignored, and somebody who understands them and can communicate them is someone who truly defies logic, science, and everything in the known world.

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The Giver transmits the memory of another ride on a sled, only this time the sled loses control and Jonas experiences pain and nausea from a badly broken leg. The pain lingers after the experience is over, but the Giver is not allowed to give him relief-of-pain, and Jonas limps home and goes to bed early. Forbidden to share his feelings with his family, he feels isolated, realizing that they have never known intense pain. Over the next days, the Giver transmits more and more painful memories, always ending the day with a memory of pleasure. After experiencing starvation, Jonas asks why these horrible memories need to be preserved, and the Giver explains that they bring wisdom: once, for example, the community wanted to increase the number of children allowed to each family, but the Giver remembered the hunger that overpopulation brings and advised against it. Jonas wonders why the whole community cannot share the pain of these important memories, and the Giver tells him that this is the reason the position of Receiver is so honored—the community does not want to be burdened and pained by memories. Jonas wants to change things, but the Giver reminds him that the situation has been the same for generations, and that there is very little hope for change.

Meanwhile, the newchild Gabriel is developing well, but still cannot sleep through the night. Jonas’s father worries that he will have to be released after all. He mentions that the Nurturing Center will probably have to make another release first, though: a Birthmother is expecting twin males, and if they are identical, one will have to be released. Jonas wonders what happens to children who are released. Is someone waiting for them Elsewhere to bring them up and take care of them? He asks his parents to let Gabriel sleep in his room that night so that he can share the responsibility of caring for him. When Gabriel wakes up crying, Jonas pats his back while remembering a wonderful sail on a lake transmitted to him by the Giver. He realizes that he is unwittingly transmitting the memory to Gabriel and stops himself. Later, he transmits the whole memory and Gabriel stops crying and sleeps. Jonas wonders if he has done the right thing.

The next day, Jonas finds the Giver in incredible pain, and the Giver asks him to take some of the pain away. The Giver transmits the terrible memory of a battlefield covered with groaning, dying men and horses. Jonas, himself horribly wounded, gives water to a young soldier and then watches him die. After this memory, Jonas never wants to go back to the Annex for more wisdom and pain, but he does, and the Giver transmits beautiful memories—birthday parties, art museums, horseback riding, camping—that celebrate individuality, brilliant colors, the bond between people and animals, and solitude, all things absent from Jonas’s society. He asks the Giver what his favorite memory is, and the Giver transmits a memory of a family—grandparents, parents, young children—opening presents at Christmas. Jonas has never heard of grandparents. In his community, parents cease to be a part of children’s lives once the children have grown up—children do not even know when their parents are released. He understands that his organized society works well, but he felt a feeling in the room that he liked. The Giver tells him that the feeling is love, and Jonas says that he wishes his own family could be like the family in the memory and that the Giver could be his grandparent. At home that evening, he asks his parents if they love him. They laugh and tell him to use more precise language: the word “love” is so general that it is almost meaningless. They enjoy him, and they are proud of him, but they cannot say they love him. Jonas pretends to agree with them, but secretly he does not understand. That night, he tells little Gabriel—who can only sleep through the night when Jonas gives him memories—that if things were different in the community, there could be colors and grandparents and love. The next morning, Jonas decides to stop taking his morning pill.

Analysis

The Giver’s role in making decisions for the community explains the importance of his position. He is not just a mystic who holds onto out-of-date emotions and sensations despite that they are no longer useful to the community. He is the only person in the community who can prevent mistakes from being repeated, which is the practical function of history. In this sense, the Giver’s job is as practical and necessary as any other in the community: through his wisdom, he keeps the community well fed and well ordered just as much as the Fish Hatchery Attendant or the Nurturer do.

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But the Giver’s presence somehow still undermines the impression of logic and order that we get from the community. The Committee of Elders does not base its decisions on real logic or reason because it lacks the resources to make any kind of considered decision about anything (the characters in the novel constantly make jokes about the Committee’s painfully slow decision-making process.) The resource they need is experience, and as a culture, Jonas’s community lacks experience: it destroys experience. On the issue of adding a third child to every family, the Committee did not take the Giver’s advice because they thought about his argument and realized that too many people would lead to a lack of resources. They took his advice on blind faith, because they lacked any other way of making a choice. Choice is impossible without memory, just as freedom is impossible without choice.

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The pain Jonas experiences isolates him further from his family and friends when he realizes that they have never experienced any real pain, but at the same time it drives him to try to forge deeper connections with other people—his parents and the newchild Gabriel. Jonas learns about love when he receives the memory of the family at Christmas, but he learns about true compassion in his experience on the battlefield. The contrast between his painful memories and his pleasurable memories is strong, but not as strong as the contrast between the memories and the colorless realities of life in Jonas’s community. Jonas’s pain gives new depth and value to his pleasure. We realize that the citizens of the community lack the capacity for pleasure not only because it would destabilize the society, but also because it is impossible to experience deep pleasure without having experienced pain, and they have consciously eliminated pain.

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Jonas’s attempt to reach out to his parents fails when they tell him that they do not love him. They emphasize precision of language, but that particular kind of precision actually limits the expressiveness of their language. Jonas knows that the feeling of love exists and that to reduce it to simpler feelings, like enjoyment and pride, is useless as well as imprecise. We see how the “precise” language the community uses for things often drains them of meaning: “pride” and “enjoyment” do not express the feeling of love, and “release” does not express the idea of death. Although we do not know for sure at this point in the novel that release is death, we have a strong suspicion. The use of the word “release,” though it might be technically correct, makes it too easy to ignore what really happens when someone dies.

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Jonas’s attempts to connect with Gabriel are much more successful. In possibly breaking the rules of his Assignment by transmitting memories to the baby, Jonas is also breaking a more unspoken rule against forming too close a bond with an individual. After experiencing the Christmas scene, with grandparents who remain part of their children’s lives long after their practical function as parents is finished, Jonas craves the kind of close, selfish relationship with another human that his society discourages. He says he understands that this kind of close family life is a “dangerous” way to live, trying to justify his statement by saying that the candles and fire in the loving family’s living room are dangerous to have indoors. The fire and candles, however, serve as symbols for the warmth and light of human love, and that love is dangerous because it would upset the delicate balance of Jonas’s society. But warmth and light are necessary for survival, and Jonas begins to feel that love is too. It is important to note that the depiction of the family at Christmas seems to idealize the traditional family group and reject the system of Nurturers and Caretakers presented by Jonas’s community. This rejection is based on the lack of love and lasting relationships to be found within Jonas’s community, and not necessarily on its nontraditional structure. This need for close relationships and desire for the strong emotion that accompanies them influences Jonas’s decision to stop taking his pills.

Jonas stops taking the pills just so he can experience the sensation of wanting something, not because he has hopes to start a sexual relationship with another person. He wants to feel capable of making choices, and he wants to want things—nothing will change if he does not want it to very badly. The only person he can connect with, besides the Giver, is the newchild Gabriel. As a new human being, Gabriel symbolizes the hope for change. Jonas can give Gabriel his memories and his love because he has not yet been conditioned to live like everyone else in the community.

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