Summary
He heard people singing. Behind him,
across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he
thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.
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Instead of waiting two weeks as he and the Giver had planned,
Jonas is forced to escape right away. At the evening meal, his father
tells the family that he tried to see if Gabriel could sleep through
the night at the Nurturing Center, and that the newchild had cried
all night. The staff, including Jonas’s father, voted to release
him the next day. Jonas cannot allow this to happen, so he takes
some leftover food and his father’s bicycle, which has a child seat,
and leaves, relying on his own courage and strength instead of on
the memories that the Giver had promised. Jonas has broken serious
rules against leaving his dwelling at night and taking food. After
riding all night, he and Gabe rest during the day, hiding from the
planes that fly overhead searching for them. He transmits
memories of exhaustion to Gabriel in order to make him sleep during
the day, and in order to avoid the heat-seeking technology of the
planes, he transmits memory of intense cold to both of them so that
their body heat does not show up on the planes’ devices. After several
days, when Jonas and Gabriel have left all communities far behind,
the planes come less frequently.
The landscape around them begins to change: the terrain becomes
bumpy and irregular, and Jonas falls and twists his ankle. He sees
waterfalls and wildlife, all new things to him after a life of Sameness.
He is happy to see beautiful things, but worries that he and Gabe
might starve, since there is no sign of cultivated land anywhere
around. He catches some fish in a makeshift net and gathers some
berries, but they are only just enough. If he had stayed in the community,
he would have had enough to eat, and he realizes that in choosing
to leave, he chose to starve. But in the community he would have
been hungry for feelings and color, and Gabriel would have died.
The weather changes, and Jonas feels cold and hunger and pain from
his twisted ankle. But he suspects that Elsewhere is not far away
and hopes that he will be able to keep Gabriel alive.
One day, it begins to snow, and Jonas’s bicycle cannot
climb the steep hill that rises before them. Jonas has lost most
of the memories he received from the Giver, but he tries to remember
sunshine and the feeling of warmth that it gives. When it comes,
he transmits the feeling to Gabriel, and it helps them make it up
the hill on foot, despite the intense cold and hunger they feel.
When he can no longer remember sunshine, and is almost totally numb
with cold, Jonas remembers his friends and family and the Giver,
and the happiness their memories give him helps him to reach the
top. He recognizes the snow-covered summit of the hill, and somehow
finds a sled waiting for him there. He gets in the sled and steers
himself and Gabe to the bottom, toward warm, twinkling lights that
glow from the windows of houses. He feels certain that the families
in those houses, where they kept memories and celebrated love, were
waiting for him and Gabe. Ahead of him, he hears singing for the
first time in his life, and he thinks that he hears the music behind
him too.
Analysis
In the last chapters of The Giver, Jonas
truly begins to exist in the world of his memories. This begins
when he makes the drastic choice to escape ahead of schedule with
Gabriel in tow. Jonas is aware that he is breaking rules against
leaving his dwelling and taking food, but in reality he is breaking
a much more serious rule, one on which his entire society is based.
He is making choices for himself as an individual, and in doing
this he is making himself important as an individual rather than
as a member of a society. He is also making the choice that Gabriel’s
individual life is more precious than the convenience of the community.
At the same time, however, Jonas is making choices that affect the
entire community, acting in what he considers their self-interest.
This choice, though, opposes another fundamental rule of the society:
everything should be done to avoid pain and discomfort. Jonas’s
escape will cause the entire community great anguish for long periods
of time until they have come to grips with the difficult memories
he leaves behind him.
After his journey becomes difficult, the consequences
of freedom become clearer to Jonas than they were in his memories
or his meditations on choice and individuality. Feeling pain, hunger,
and cold, Jonas realizes that all of his present misery is a direct
result of his own actions. He understands for the first time that
one choice always eliminates another choice. His community has chosen
peace and comfort over extreme joy and pain, order over freedom,
and Jonas sees that each choice has its advantages and disadvantages. But
when he decides that the life he has chosen is better than the one he
rejected, Jonas affirms that the important thing is choice. People with
free choice have to accept the consequences of their actions, but
in the end they will be happier to have the choice.
Jonas’s powers of memory become undeniably magical on
his journey. Earlier in the novel, the process of receiving memories
has seemed mystical and mysterious, the opposite of the carefully
reasoned, intricately explained rules of the community, symbolizing how
removed the citizens are from the complexity of emotion. On the
road, however, Jonas’s mental powers become so strong that they
are able to defy the community’s sophisticated tracking technology
and defeat the natural world. Memories of cold keep Jonas and Gabriel
safe from the heat-seeking planes searching overhead, and memories
of warmth help them to stay alive in the bitter cold. The extent
of Jonas’s powers to defy technology indicates that feelings have
triumphed over cold logic in the story, regardless of whether Jonas
survives his journey.
