The Giver — Chapter 14

About This Passage

Lowry loads this passage with the pharmacological vocabulary of a Community that has engineered pain out of ordinary life — daub, anesthetic, ointment, severe, instantaneous, deliverance. The last word, deliverance, is the one to watch: its religious register carries the argument that the Community has built a secular system of salvation, and that system is what the Giver is now teaching Jonas to refuse.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 14 in four to six sentences, beginning with the broken-leg sled memory and ending with Jonas accidentally transmitting the sail memory to Gabriel. Pay attention to the sequence — what Jonas suffers, what he learns from the Giver, and what he discovers he can do.

Discussion Questions

1. When the Giver refuses Jonas's request for relief-of-pain and simply 'looked away,' what is Lowry doing by denying both Jonas and the reader an explanation at that exact moment? How does the explanation Jonas receives later in the chapter, about hunger and wisdom, redescribe what that silent refusal was?
2. The Giver tells Jonas that the Committee of Elders asked for his counsel when they wanted to increase the birth rate, and that the 'strongest memory' was hunger, which 'was followed by warfare.' What does Lowry imply about the kind of knowledge a society needs in order to govern itself wisely, and why is that knowledge dangerous to distribute?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide