The Giver — Chapter 20

About This Passage

This is the novel's most compressed image of what the Giver is about to do for the community — and what the community has already done to itself. The citizens have voluntarily surrendered the two resources they would need in a crisis (solace and wisdom, both carried in memory) to a single office, and when the crisis comes, that office will be their only recourse. Lowry stages the moral architecture in a single sentence: the community has made itself dependent, and the Giver has agreed to be the dependency's last point of contact.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 20 as four coordinated disclosures: Jonas's collapse and sarcastic mimicry; the Giver's professional disclosure about Fiona and the Nurturers; the collaborative construction of the plan; and the revelation that Rosemary was the Giver's daughter.

Discussion Questions

1. The Giver tells Jonas, 'I am empowered to lie.' The verb 'empowered' is bureaucratic and morally inverted — authority has been granted to deceive. Analyze how Lowry's word choice forces the reader to confront the community as a political system that has formally distributed the license to deceive among its offices, and compare this to the way modern states classify information. What does it mean for a community to make lying a form of institutional authority?
2. When Jonas proposes that he and the Giver 'not care about the rest of them,' the Giver produces no counterargument — only a questioning smile. Jonas self-corrects: 'Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.' Examine the structural claim Lowry makes about moral formation by staging this as a silent exchange. What does it reveal about the relationship between Socratic silence and moral maturity, and how is this passage a commentary on the Giver's entire pedagogical method?

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