The Giver — Chapter 9

About This Passage

These are the final sentences of the chapter, and Lois Lowry has built them to enact the collapse they describe. The clause structure deteriorates under pressure: a clean main clause (empowered to ask), an interrupting concession (and promised answers), a modal tentativeness (he could, conceivably), a parenthetical doubt about the tentative itself (though it was almost unimaginable), a specified but imagined addressee (some adult, his father perhaps), the imagined question in quotation marks, and finally the flat ruin of the whole construction: But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received were true. The sentence performs Jonas's new epistemic condition — he has been granted a power whose exercise cannot produce the knowledge the power was supposed to grant.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 9 in seven to ten sentences, tracing the formal progression: the felt apartness immediately after the Auditorium, the inflected bike ride with Asher, the family dinner in which the parents can offer honor but not information about the previous failed Receiver, the eight rules read alone, and the final realization that the community's permission to ask has been installed atop a permission to lie.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter's opening — "Now, for the first time in his twelve years of life, Jonas felt separate, different" — places Jonas's new status prior to any training activity. Analyze how Lois Lowry's choice to locate the apartness in felt experience rather than institutional procedure reconfigures the Chief Elder's official formulation ("alone, apart") into something the Receiver discovers has already been true of him, and consider what this does to the reader's sense of the community's honesty about its own arrangements.
2. The rule "You may lie," placed last on the sheet, causes Jonas to realize that adults in the community may have been told the same. Considering Bernard Williams's distinction between truthfulness (a disposition) and truth (a content), argue whether Rule 8 withdraws from Jonas the disposition or the content, and defend which withdrawal is the more destabilizing for a person whose communal life has depended on both.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide