The Giver — Chapter 12

About This Passage

Lois Lowry builds this paragraph through progressive narrowing—Fiona, then not her entirety, then just her hair, then just for that flickering instant. The grammar performs exactly what Jonas's new perception is doing: zooming in from a whole person to a single flash of the color his community has erased, with the short final fragment mimicking the brevity of the perception itself.

Narration Prompt

Retell the chapter in six to eight sentences, tracking the dream of the destination beyond the hill, the breakfast deception, the linguistic impossibility Jonas discovers at school, the silent ride with Fiona, the bookcase test, and the Giver's disclosure that Jonas is beginning to see the color red.

Discussion Questions

1. Jonas tells his mother he had no dreams when he has in fact spent the night re-dreaming the sled ride. Lois Lowry makes this lie the first seam in the Community-self Jonas has inhabited until now. Analyze what the author is claiming about the relationship between transmitted memory and ordinary truthfulness, and argue whether Jonas's deception is ethical compromise or self-protection compelled by the incompatibility between his role and his family's expectations.
2. The Giver tells Jonas, 'It's your memory, now. It's not mine to experience any longer. I gave it away.' Evaluate the metaphysics Lowry is committing to, drawing on the Lockean account of memory as criterion of personal identity and on Ricoeur's distinction between habit-memory and event-memory. What does Lowry need this metaphysics to do for the novel's later moral architecture?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide