The Giver

The Giver
by Lois Lowry, 1993

This book is required reading in the middle school my sons attended and both of them raved about it as one of their favorite books.  When I recently read it for book club, I was surprised that such an intense, bleak book was being read by our tender, suburban 11 and 12 year olds.  Surprised, but pleased.

The Giver raises important questions about what we value in society, and in humanity.  What are the essential qualities of our humanity?  What role does suffering play?  What is love?  Is it worth reducing our humanity in order to have a more orderly society?

In the utopia of The Giver, all families are chosen.  Everyone is adopted.  Each family has a mother, a father, a son and a daughter.  Family members express appreciation for each other but not "love" (which is deemed too vague a term; they may have a point there). At the beginning of each day, dreams are shared and analyzed away at breakfast.  In the evening there is another mealtime sharing of feelings which serves to monitor and normalize each person's psyche.  Apologies and forgiveness are automatically proferred as part of the rigid, yet cozy set of emotional rituals members of this society exhibit.  This is presented in a rather believable, unpathologized manner.  Built-in therapy is an obligatory family tradition.

All potentially negative experiences are sanitized or analyzed away, including sexuality which is controlled with drugs when children reach puberty and begin to experience "stirrings".  If it could cause emotional pain, it is neutralized.  Interestingly, they still have to employ birthmothers to gestate children, and this is considered a low-class job.  Birthmothers get to be indulged for the few years that they are employed as such, but then go on to live as manual laborers, perhaps to discourage girls from wanting to become birthmothers.  In this society you cannot apparently be both a birther and an intellectual, or even a manager. 

Many aspects of this society seem quite cozy, and indeed it has been carefully constructed to ensure its members' optimum utility and emotional safety.  People need not fear making the wrong decision regarding course of study or job or spouse, since this will be chosen for you.  Furthermore, even children are especially chosen for families.  From a certain perspective this could seem reassuring.  Knowing what we are supposed to do is comforting; people like boundaries and traditions. The problem is that, as in any totalitarian regime, the tradition is not optional and the price of noncompliance may be the ultimate price.

When people are consistently unable to comply with society's requirements, they are relegated to be "released".  "Release" is a semi-mythical exile for members of this society who do not fit in, or who have reached the ends of their lives. Children do not know what it means, and it seems that many adults don't know either.  The Giver is a story of one boy, Jonas, who finds out the real meaning of release.

The book is named after the one person the society employs to act as the repository for all the culture's emotional history, including its painful history, of which everyone else is blissfully ignorant. Through a sort of visceral, sense-memory transfer, the Giver shares these experiences with the Receiver, who will become the next Giver, ensuring a redundant source of these memories.  Twelve-year-old Jonas is presented with the honor of becoming the Receiver, while his friends are being apprenticed to become teachers or scientists or day care providers.  The Giver also functions as a sort of uber-Elder, being consulted by the council of Elders on matters of policy for the society.

What my kids found most impressive about this book, aside from the sheer weirdness of its controlled society, was that the members of the society had lost the ability to see color or hear music.  Jonas, as the Receiver, is gradually given the ability to experience color and music, and with this the sublime and painful emotions that come with their nuances.  This society is predicated on the notion that there must be severe limits placed on human experience so that people will not suffer, so that there will be equilibrium in society.  One is reminded of ascetic movements that extol the plain, such as the Amish, and of Buddhism's assertion that desire is suffering.  Many have tried to reduce human suffering by reducing our ability to feel, or even to perceive, never mind our ability to procreate.  Placing restrictions on behavior is the basis of civilized society, but when is it too much?  When does it lead to pathology, to dehumanization?  It's a good thing this book, banned in some school districts, is required reading in our kids' public school. Far from advocating dehumanizing practices, it encourages kids to appreciate the wide range of experiences that make us human, and to weigh their worth.