Summary
“We failed in our last selection,” the
Chief Elder said solemnly.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Just before the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas and the other
Elevens line up by number—in addition to his or her name, each child
has a number that was assigned at birth, showing the order in which
he or she was born. Jonas is Nineteen; his friend Fiona is Eighteen.
The Chief Elder, the elected leader of the community, gives a speech before
the Ceremony, noting that it is the one time the community recognizes
the differences between the children rather than ignoring them as
is customary and polite. Jonas watches and listens as his classmates
receive their Assignments. His friend Asher is assigned the position
of Assistant Director of Recreation after the Chief Elder gives
a long and humorous speech about Asher’s pleasant, fun-loving nature
and the trouble he has had in using precise language. She recalls
a time when Asher confused the words “snack” and “smack” at the
Childcare Center, and received a smack with the discipline wand
every time. She laughs as she remembers that for a while, three-year-old
Asher refused to talk at all, but that “he learned . . . [a]nd now
his lapses are very few.” Jonas is relieved that Asher has received
a wonderful Assignment and happy to see that his other classmates
are pleased with their Assignments too.
But when Jonas’s turn comes, the Chief Elder skips over
him, moving from Eighteen to Twenty without acknowledging him. Jonas
endures the rest of the Ceremony in horrible embarrassment and worry,
wondering what he has done wrong. The audience is concerned too—they
are unused to disorder and mistakes. At the end of the Ceremony,
the Chief Elder apologizes for causing the audience concern and
causing Jonas anguish. She tells him that he has been selected for
a very special position, that of Receiver of Memory. The community
has only one Receiver at a time, and the current one—a bearded man
with pale eyes like Jonas’s, sitting with the Committee of Elders—is
very old and needs to train a successor. The Chief Elder explains
that ten years ago, a new Receiver had been selected, but the selection
had been a terrible failure. After Jonas was identified as a possible
Receiver, the Elders watched him very carefully and made a unanimous
decision to select him, despite the strict selection criteria. To
begin with, the candidate for Receiver can be rejected if any of
the Elders so much as dreams that he might not be the best selection.
The Receiver also needs to possess intelligence, integrity, and
courage, as well as the ability to acquire wisdom. Courage is especially
important, because as the Receiver, Jonas will experience real pain,
something no one else in the community experiences. The job also
requires the “Capacity to See Beyond.” Jonas does not believe he
has this capacity, but then he looks out at the crowd and sees their
faces change, the way the apple changed in midair. He realizes he
does have it after all. The Chief Elder thanks him for his childhood,
and the crowd accepts him as the new Receiver by chanting his name
louder and louder. Jonas feels gratitude, pride, and fear at the
same time.
Although his training, which will keep him apart from
other members of the community, has not yet begun, Jonas immediately begins
to feel isolated from his friends and family, who treat him differently
from before, though very respectfully. At home, his family is quieter
than usual, though his parents tell him that they are very honored
that he has been selected as Receiver. When he asks about the previous,
failed selection, they reluctantly tell him that the name of the
female selected ten years ago is Not-to-Be-Spoken, indicating the
highest degree of disgrace.
Before bed, Jonas looks over the single sheet of paper
in his Assignment folder. He learns that he is exempted from rules
governing rudeness—he can ask anyone any question he likes and expect an
answer—that he is not allowed to discuss his training with anyone,
that he is not allowed to tell his dreams to anyone, that he cannot
apply for medication unless it is for an illness unrelated to his training,
that he cannot apply for release, and that he is allowed to lie.
He also learns that he will have very little time for recreation
and wonders what will happen to his friendships. The other instructions disturb
him too—he cannot imagine being rude, nor can he imagine not having
access to medication. In his community, medicine is always instantly
delivered to stop pain of any kind, and the idea that his training
involves excruciating pain is almost incomprehensible. He cannot
imagine lying, either, having been trained since childhood to speak
with total precision and accuracy, even avoiding exaggeration and
figures of speech. He wonders if anyone else in his community is
allowed to lie too.
Analysis
The Chief Elder’s description of Asher’s childhood troubles
gives us our first concrete example of the real cruelty that keeps
the community so peaceful and happy. Though Asher seems to be a
well-adjusted child, the idea that a normal three-year-old child’s
confusion of two similar words could be so systematically and coldheartedly
punished is difficult to accept. When a child whose language development
had been progressing normally suddenly regresses into silence from
constant physical punishment, that is evidence of severe trauma. Several
events in the novel have already made us wonder if the peace and
order of the society is worth the sacrifices its members have to
make—sacrifices of individual freedom, deep personal relationships,
and sexual pleasure—but Asher’s punishments demonstrate the severity
of those sacrifices and help us to understand how intolerant the
community is of differences and personality quirks.
Of course, the Ceremony of Twelve is the time when the
community celebrates differences, and for Jonas it is the time when
his own differences are made uncomfortably clear. His anguish and
discomfort at being singled out at the Ceremony is only his first
taste of the isolation he will experience as the new Receiver—the
only member of the community whose life experience is appreciably
different from anyone else’s. His family’s quiet respect for him
and his friends’ distant behavior contribute to this growing feeling
of isolation. Jonas is already different—already he has the ability
to see beyond—but until now, he has not felt particularly different,
and it has not occurred to him to criticize or question many of
the community’s rules and practices. Interestingly, the role he
is assigned, in accentuating his differences, encourages him to
question those rules and practices, as he begins to do at the end
of Chapter 9. The rules that permit him to
act differently—he is permitted to be rude and to lie, among other
things—encourage him to think differently: his permission to lie
makes him wonder for the first time if other people in his society
are permitted to lie too. Jonas loses some of his faith and trust
in the members of his community. This slight loss of trust reminds
us how dangerous it is to the structure of Jonas’s society to permit
free choice or to encourage free thought.
