The Giver — Chapter 17

About This Passage

Selected because the passage stages the breakdown of a collective fiction in real time. A ritual-firing noise is launched, finds no reply, and the children must stand inside the silence it produces. Lowry's sound design — the onomatopoeia, then silence, then Jonas's shuddering breaths — is a soundtrack of a ritual failing to hold, and the paragraph's final motion is children quietly dispersing from a game that has lost its magic circle.

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct Chapter 17 in nine to eleven sentences, tracking the chapter's three movements: the morning of the unscheduled holiday with Jonas's internal sense of heightened perception; the catastrophe at the playing field and its aftermath with Asher and Fiona; and the evening meal with Father's description of releasing the smaller twin. Note the hinge phrase "He had never recognized it before as a game of war" as the chapter's pivot.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter's internal monologue introduces a new vocabulary for Jonas — "real sadness," "grief," "rage" — and explicitly stages their insufficiency against the family's ritual of naming shallow impatience as anger. Is Lowry arguing that the community has suppressed feeling, that it has renamed feeling, or that it has produced a genuinely new and diminished emotional register through the joint operation of pills, language, and ritual? How does the text itself adjudicate among these readings?
2. Jonas's breakdown on the field is triggered not by a new memory but by the recurrence of an old one — "the face of the boy who had lain dying on a field and had begged him for water." What does Lowry reveal about the relationship between received memory and present perception by having the Chapter 15 warfare memory interrupt the Chapter 17 game so bodily that Jonas cannot breathe? What is the phenomenology of memory this implies?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide