The Giver — Chapter 22

About This Passage

This passage is chosen for its compressed demonstration of Jonas's regression from citizen to subsistence forager: the verbs descend from civilized effort ('tried,' 'threw') through invention ('fashioned,' 'looping') to the grim adverb 'Methodically,' which Lowry places in the passage's most emphasized syntactic slot. The single strand of Gabriel's blanket — the first thing Jonas thought to take with him — is now disassembled as tool. Practice imitatio by tracking how Lowry's sentence lengths contract as hunger advances, and by copying the moral weight she places on the word 'raw.'

Narration Prompt

Retell chapter 22 in a substantial analytical paragraph (at least eight sentences) that organizes the chapter's events around a single interpretive claim — Jonas's sensory awakening, his physical depletion, his internal re-evaluation of the word 'choice,' or the convergence of all three into a new moral condition the community has no vocabulary for.

Discussion Questions

1. In chapter 22 Jonas recalls being chastised as a child for misusing the word 'starving' — 'You have never been starving, he had been told. You will never be starving.' — and concludes that he now is. What kind of knowledge is the community protecting its citizens from by policing the word, and what kind of knowledge does Jonas acquire at the moment he is entitled to use it accurately? Distinguish experiential knowledge from propositional knowledge in your answer, and weigh whether the community's linguistic prohibition was a kindness, a mutilation, or both.
2. Jonas resolves in chapter 22 that 'there had not really been a choice,' because staying would have meant starvation 'for feelings, for color, for love,' and for Gabriel 'there would have been no life at all.' Evaluate this reasoning: has Jonas discovered a deeper truth about the original decision he made in chapter 19, or has he constructed a post-hoc moral cover for an act he committed under panic and is now unable to reverse? Consider whether the distinction between 'discovery' and 'rationalization' is itself coherent in conditions of physical depletion.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide