Book Review: The Giver

I was bored and contemplative last Sunday, so i decided to re-read The Giver.

The Giver is a really awesome book. It covers a range of issues concerning human life, including memory, perception, and consciousness. In a lot of ways, the Giver is an introductory course in understanding what consciousness is and how it works. In my opinion, consciousness is the single most important topic in the discussion of human life. The Giver centers on the story of one boy named Jonas in his village. In describing the village and its society, Lois Lowry depicts a world reminiscent of 1984 without all of the brutal totalitarianism. In other words, the story takes place in a Utopian world where every single action and area of human life is regulated, directed, and controlled by the government. This government rules with the consent of the people. Lois Lowry picks 11 as Jonas' age so that we read it as a coming of age story, since this is typically the age at which people begin to consider the world and their place in it in a meaningful way. And indeed, when 11 year olds turn twelve in the story, their childhood is declared, "over," and they are assigned a profession by the government. Everything a child can do depends on his or her age; the specific type of clothing a child may wear, the activities they are allowed to do, and the equipment they are allowed to use all depend on his or her age. For example, when children turn 9, it is no longer illegal for them to ride bikes. This reveals an interesting strategy behind Lowry's writing; she takes prevailing social attitudes and assumptions about age and human development from the real world and makes them institutionalized, legalized, facts in the world of The Giver. This is essential to demonstrating the points she ultimately desires to make, the virtual themes of the book.

One such theme is the transition between childhood and adulthood. We typically make assumptions about the changes that occur in adolescence (the transition zone), such as maturity, responsibility, and an understanding of how the world functions. However, these changes do not occur instantly when an 11 year old turns twelve; they occur in a long, uneven, and nebulous process that hardly conforms the established parameters of age, gender, or any other type of distinction. By institutionalizing these variable things that relate to development, Lowry standardizes them and makes them much more comprehensible. Furthermore, by presenting them as institutional fact , she allows us reflect upon how we ourselves interpret how a young person develops in our own society and find his or her place in our world. Finally, by depicting the state as the all powerful decider behind all major decisions that occur in a person's life, Lowry depicts a world in which individuals have no control over the course of their own life.
This state apparatus also robs its citizens of their individuality, since the only differences the state allows people to possess are in their careers. However, Lowry shows that even in this area, the state assigns particular roles to individuals based on their skills and abilities in certain fields, over which an individual does not possess much personal control.

Lowry thus preys upon modern man's fear of losing his individuality to the industrialized state. She extrapolates this fear to the extreme, and makes it all the more glaring since everyone in the novel (with the exception of Jonas) are completely content with the world in which they live. Jonas acts up because he possesses a unique ability to, "see beyond." Lowry reveals that in the world of The Giver, color and emotion do not exist. However, Jonas can see color, which the state realizes and assigns him the role of "Receiver of Memory" because of it. The Giver (of memory) actually refers to the title of an old man in the story, who it turns out is the exclusive holder of every single memory in the world. The world of the novel, black and white, structured, and uniform, and all of its inhabitants, are completely ignorant of these memories. These memories contain strong, genuine emotions, beautiful and varied colors, and experiences beyond the comprehension of average citizens. Through Jonas' acquisition of these memories, Lowry introduces an important concept. There is a distinction between how you perceive the world, and the world itself. The Giver embodies this distinction; besides Jonas, he is the only one in the entire society who has a two-part consciousness. One part resembles the consciousness of everyone else in the society. Ironically, the consciousness that everyone besides the Giver possesses is objective, not subjective. This is due to the fact that people lack emotion, memory, and subjective perception of the suroundings. Every perception is regulated, institutionalized, and objectified by the state. Even the society's language, one of the most vital expressions of a person's subjectivity, is objectified by the state. Throughout the novel, authority figures in the world of the novel constantly stress the importance of "precision of langauge." This "precision" serves the purpose of communicating information for practicality's sake, serving no deeper, more personal, or least of all subjective, function. The Giver is thus the only member of his society with a second part to his consciousness, a subjectified part.

Lowry uses the Giver's two-part consciousness as a model for understanding our own. On the one hand, human's can see objects, hear sounds, taste flavors, smell scents, and touch just about whatever we want. On the other hand, the way in which we use our senses is uniquely our own. By uniformitizing everyone's senses, Lowry objectifies their consciousness. Then, she symbolically places all the world's subjectivity in the hands of one man, The Giver.

We thus have three models for consciousness: a purely objective one, a balanced subjective/objective one, and Jonas'. In Jonas,' we occupy the convenient position of observing an objective consciousness become subjectified as the Giver transfers his memories, the vehicles of subjectivity, to Jonas. Watching this process unfold causes us to reflect upon on own consciousness.