The Giver — Chapter 15

About This Passage

Lowry slows the sentence deliberately. Short phrases — tried his remaining arm, felt it move, reached to his side, removed its cap — are joined with commas rather than clauses of explanation, so the reader's eye is forced to move at the pace of Jonas's actual body. The surging pain is not reported once at the start; it interrupts the action repeatedly, which is the truth of how pain behaves. What looks on the page like a description of a small action is in fact a study of what it costs Jonas to keep moving when his own body is telling him to stop. The passage rewards the student who notices that the syntax itself is wounded and cautious.

Narration Prompt

In your own words, retell Chapter 15. Begin with the state the Giver is in when Jonas arrives, move through the warfare memory as Jonas experiences it, and end with the Giver's final words. Keep the order of events intact so that a classmate who has not read the chapter could follow the arc from offer, to transmission, to apology.

Discussion Questions

1. Before he offers to help, Jonas observes that the Giver is 'rigid in his chair, his face in his hands.' What in the story tells you that Jonas is reading the Giver the way one reads a person who is well-known to him, and how does this kind of attentive reading shape the partnership the two will need in the chapters that follow?
2. In the memory, Jonas gives water to the wounded boy 'inch by inch,' with his own arm broken, to a stranger in a uniform he does not recognize. What in the story shows that Lowry is distinguishing here between charity that is easy and charity that is costly, and how does that distinction carry moral weight that Jonas would not have felt in an earlier memory?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide