The Giver — Chapter 14

Narration Prompt

Open with a précis of Chapter 14: the second, harsher sled memory and the broken leg; the Giver's refusal of relief-of-pain; the pedagogy of hunger and the Elders' petition on birth rates; the father's dinner-table disclosure about releasing the smaller twin; Jonas's accidental, then deliberate, transmission of the sail memory to Gabriel; and Jonas's decision to tell no one. Move into the questions below.

Discussion Questions

1. The Giver tells Jonas that the memory of hunger 'came from many generations back. Centuries back,' and that the Committee received the resulting counsel without the evidentiary base. Reading this alongside Edmund Burke's account of tradition as the accumulated wisdom of the dead, is Lowry offering a Burkean defense of intergenerational memory, a critique of it, or a third position that corrects both? Where does the chapter make the correction visible?
2. Jonas's father announces, with untroubled affect, that he will select the smaller twin to be released. This is the chapter's most disturbing moment, and it is accomplished by tone rather than by argument. Reading this alongside Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' and Raul Hilberg's analysis of perpetrator ordinariness, does Lowry's scene extend those accounts, soften them, or identify something neither captured — that affection and atrocity can occupy the same voice without either being faked?

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