The Giver — Chapter 13

About This Passage

This sentence marks the transition into the elephant-poaching memory and sets the sensory register Lowry uses to make a foreign landscape suddenly inhabitable to Jonas. The diction (startling, disturbing, alien, windswept) chosen by Lowry shifts the reader from the orderly Community into a place the community has erased from collective experience.

Narration Prompt

Retell the events of Chapter 13 in four to six sentences, beginning with Jonas's frustration over colors and ending with his request that the Giver share some of the pain with him.

Discussion Questions

1. When Jonas says to the Giver, 'It isn't fair that nothing has color!', he then quickly adds that it isn't important what you wear. What does Lowry reveal about Jonas's moral reasoning by having him make and then partially retract the claim inside the same exchange?
2. The Giver tells Jonas that the Committee of Elders calls on him 'Rarely. Only when they are faced with something that they have not experienced before.' What does this arrangement suggest about how the Community understands the value of memory and wisdom, and what are the costs of using a Receiver in this way?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide