The Giver — Chapter 12

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 12 in eight to ten sentences, tracing the dream of the unreachable destination, the breakfast deception, the failure of language at school, the ride with Fiona that opens Jonas's first sustained perception of red, the Giver's bookcase test, and the disclosure that the Community relinquished color when it relinquished sunshine.

Discussion Questions

1. The Giver tells Jonas that the sled memory is 'your memory, now. It's not mine to experience any longer. I gave it away.' Read this ontological disclosure against the Lockean tradition in which continuity of memory is constitutive of personal identity, and consider whether Lois Lowry is committing to a proprietary model (memory as transferable content), a relational model (memory as shared substance), or something more local that her narrative requires without fully theorizing. What does the chapter's ontology demand of any reader who attempts to map it onto familiar philosophical frames?
2. Jonas's first lie—'No dreams'—protects a transmitted memory rather than a personal experience. Situate this seam against Charles Taylor's account of the porous self, Foucault's confessional subject, and Arendt's analysis of the public-private distinction. What claim is Lowry staking about the incompatibility between a Community that requires full disclosure of interior life and a role that presupposes interior experiences the Community has itself forbidden?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide