The Giver — Chapter 21

About This Passage

Lowry registers the moment Jonas crosses the bridge by telling us what he does not feel (fear, regret) before what he does feel (sadness at leaving the Giver). The absence of fear is not bravery in a heroic sense; it is the quietness of a person who has already accepted what is happening. What Jonas does feel — a 'very deep sadness' for the Giver alone — is the first time in the novel that Jonas has experienced love in its full form: love as something that hurts more to leave than the community that raised him. That the farewell is silent and interior is Lowry's argument that the deepest relationships do not require speech.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 21 in four movements: the evening meal where Father announces Gabriel's scheduled release; Jonas's midnight preparation and escape with Gabriel; the days of riding, hiding, and evading search planes by transmitting memories of cold; and the gradual diminishment of memories as Jonas moves farther from the community.

Discussion Questions

1. Father describes Gabriel's overnight stay at the Nurturing Center as 'a disaster,' and the household conversation proceeds through sympathy ('Didn't it go well?'), humor ('Gabe, you naughty thing'), and administrative resolution ('Even I voted for Gabriel's release'). Analyze the social choreography of the dinner scene. What does Lowry show about how the community processes the decision to kill a child through the registers of ordinary domestic speech?
2. The narrator describes Jonas, before leaving, laying his hands 'firmly on Gabe's back' and transmitting the hammock memory. The gesture deliberately mirrors the Giver's method of memory transmission, but Jonas now performs it as the giver rather than the receiver. Examine what this reversal reveals about what Jonas has become during his year with the Giver, and what the act of chosen transmission accomplishes that received transmission could not.

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