The Giver — Chapter 13

About This Passage

Lois Lowry slows the sentence with a colon and then piles up five adjectives and participles—tortured, towering, immense, meticulous, tended—to enact what Jonas is trying to do: compress a whole living creature into a single moment of touch that Lily might feel. The sentence's heaped phrases mirror Jonas's unsaid wish that language could carry the weight of a real elephant.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 13 in five or six sentences, covering the flickering colors Jonas begins to see, his growing anger at Sameness, the attempts to share memory with Asher and Lily, the elephant poaching memory, and the Giver's explanation of why the community needs a Receiver.

Discussion Questions

1. Jonas tells the Giver, 'It's not fair that nothing has color!' When the Giver asks what he means, Jonas's answer is really about choosing, not about color. What is Lois Lowry suggesting about the deeper loss that Sameness has caused, and how does the color red become the visible shape of a bigger invisible absence?
2. Jonas tries to transmit red to Asher and the elephant to Lily, and both attempts fail. What does Lowry want the reader to take from these two failures, and what does the author imply about whether memory can really be given without a teacher like the Giver and a student trained to receive it?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide