Summary
Four weeks after Jonas stops taking his pills, an unscheduled
holiday is declared in the community. His Stirrings have returned,
and he has pleasurable dreams that make him feel a little guilty,
but he refuses to give up the heightened feelings that the Stirrings
and his wonderful memories have given him. Jonas realizes that he
now experiences a new depth of feeling. He understands that the
feelings his family and friends call anger and sadness and happiness
are nothing like the feelings of rage and despair and joy he knows through
his memories. On this particular holiday, Jonas refuses to participate
with his friends in a game of good guys and bad guys, because he
recognizes it as a war game. He tries to explain to his friends
that the game is a cruel mockery of a horrible reality, but they
are only puzzled and annoyed. He leaves his friends, knowing that
they cannot understand his feelings or even return the strong love
that he feels for them. At home, he feels better when he sees Gabe,
who has learned to walk and to say his own name. His father talks
about the upcoming release of one of the identical twins that will
be born the next day. Jonas asks his father if he will actually
take the newchild Elsewhere, and his father says no. He will only
select the child with the lowest birthweight, perform a Ceremony
of Release, and wave goodbye. Someone else will come and get him from
Elsewhere. Lily speculates about two identical twins growing up
with the same name, one here and one Elsewhere.
The next day, Jonas asks the Giver if he thinks about
release. The Giver says he thinks of his own when he is in great
pain, but that he cannot apply for release until Jonas is trained.
Jonas cannot ask for release either, a rule that was created after
the failure of the new Receiver ten years ago. At Jonas’s insistence,
the Giver tells him what happened. The failed Receiver was intelligent
and eager to learn, and her name was Rosemary. The Giver tells Jonas
that he loved her, and that he loves Jonas in the same way. When
Rosemary’s training began, she loved experiencing new things, and
the Giver started with happy memories that would make her laugh.
But she wanted more difficult memories. The Giver could not bring
himself to give her physical pain, but at her insistence he gave
her loneliness, loss, poverty, and fear. After a very hard session,
she kissed the Giver’s cheek and left. He never saw her again. Later,
he learned that she had applied for release that day. Jonas knows
that he cannot apply for release, but he asks the Giver what would
happen if he accidentally drowned in the river, carrying a year’s
worth of memories with him. The Giver tells him it would be a disaster:
his memories would not be lost, but instead all of the people in
the community would have them, and they would not be able to deal
with them. The Giver becomes thoughtful and says that if that happened,
perhaps he could help the community to deal with the memories in
the same way that he helps Jonas, but that he would need more time
to think about it. He warns Jonas to stay away from the river, just
in case.
Analysis
The attitudes that Asher and Lily have toward
violence and release are typical, since neither understands what
violence and death really entail. For Lily in particular, and also
for Jonas, the precision of the word “release” allows her to totally
ignore the pain, suffering, and sadness that often accompany death,
since she literally believes that released children are raised by
families in other communities. Treating release as only slightly
more serious than a journey is made possible by the word itself,
since it can have other meanings besides death.
Jonas, too, still does not understand what release really
means. Since Jonas suffered death and pain through the Giver’s memories, we
might expect him to suspect the truth. However, though Jonas is well
versed in the ways of the world before Sameness, his memories have
taught him nothing about life in his community. His time with the
Giver has made him aware of what his community does not offer (color,
desire, pain), but it has not revealed any of the secrets concealed
beneath his society’s veneer of tranquility. Jonas does not associate
the idea of release with his new understanding of physical pain. Instead,
he is curious because his recent exposure to psychological pain—to
real loneliness and real happiness—makes him wonder about the difficult
separation from the community, and his new isolation that makes
him wonder about the ultimate isolation of release.
Rosemary, the name of the failed Receiver, is also the
name of an herb that is associated with remembrance. Rosemary was
an appropriate choice for Receiver, but the fact that after her
failure it was forbidden to speak her name again is telling: after
their unpleasant experience dealing with all of Rosemary’s released
memories, the community wanted nothing to do with remembrance, and
their rejection of her name constitutes a double rejection of memory.
It is interesting to note that though the Giver could
not bear to give Rosemary physical pain, he allowed himself to give
her pain that some people might consider to be far worse than physical
pain. He subjects Jonas to a broken leg, starvation, and war wounds,
but these agonies eventually subside. Apparently—at least at the
time—he thought Rosemary was better suited to endure loneliness
and fear. The community seems to have eliminated gender roles when
it went to Sameness, and yet a few traditional gender stereotypes remain:
girls and boys have different hairstyles, for example, and the Giver
at least seems to think girls should be treated with more physical
gentleness.
