INTRODUCTION
This page has been created to support the Year 8 English novel study of The Giver by Lois Lowry.
Last updated: September 2025
TRAILER
COVER
BLURB
It is the future. There is no war, no hunger, no pain. No one in the community wants for anything. Everything needed is provided. And at twelve years old, each member of the community has their profession carefully chosen for them by the Committee of Elders.
Twelve-year old Jonas has never thought there was anything wrong with his world. But from the moment he is selected as the Receiver of Memory, Jonas discovers that their community is not as perfect as it seems. The honour of selection is nothing compared to the loneliness and physical pain he must endure as he searches for a way to free his community from the spiritless life it has developed for its members.
It is only with the help of the Giver, that Jonas can find what has been lost. And it is only through his personal courage that Jonas finds the strength to do what is right…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR – LOIS LOWRY
Lowry was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and attended junior high school in Tokyo, Japan. Her father was a dentist for the U.S. Army and his job entailed a lot of traveling. She still likes to travel. At the age of 17, Lowry attended Brown University and majored in writing. She left school at 19, got married, and had four children before her 25th birthday. After some time, she returned to college and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Maine. Lowry didn’t start writing professionally until she was in her mid-30s. Now she spends time writing every single day. Before she begins a book, she usually knows the beginning and end of her story.
When she’s not writing, Lowry enjoys gardening during the spring and summer and knitting during the winter. One of her other hobbies is photography, and her own photos grace the covers of Number the Stars, The Giver, and Gathering Blue. Lois Lowry has four children and two grandchildren. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Source: Penguin Random House
The Novel
PLOT SUMMARY
(Warning – Contains Spoilers)
The story starts with eleven-year-old Jonas worrying about the upcoming Ceremony of Twelve. This ceremony is when the Elevens are given their Assignments. One evening before the Ceremony, Jonas’s father, a Nurturer, brings home a newchild who needs extra nurturing. Jonas’s father hopes to help the baby, named Gabe, grow and learn to sleep, so that the Committee will not vote to release him.
The Ceremony of Twelve begins and the Chief Elder makes the Assignments but skips Jonas when it is his turn. After she makes the final Assignment, the Chief Elder apologizes to Jonas. Then she says that he has been “selected to be our next Receiver of Memory.” She says that the Committee failed in their last selection ten years ago, and has been very careful with this one. She explains that the job, the most honoured in the community, requires that The Receiver be alone and apart, and that Jonas will need a tremendous amount of courage because he will be faced “with pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience.” Jonas wonders if he has this courage.
Jonas begins his training the next day. The Receiver tells Jonas, “My job is to transmit to you all of the memories I have within me. Memories of the past…. Memories of the whole world.” Jonas is confused. “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.” The current Receiver becomes The Giver and gives Jonas his first memory: that of a sled ride down a hill. When Jonas asks why snow, sleds, and hills no longer exist, The Giver explains that they became obsolete when the community decided to go to Sameness.
As he continues his training, Jonas feels frustrated to realize how few choices he has. Meanwhile, the newchild still isn’t sleeping well, so Jonas tries taking him into his room at night. The first time Gabe fusses, Jonas rubs the baby’s back. As he does so, he remembers a wonderful sail The Giver gave to him. The memory begins to fade, and Jonas realizes he is giving the memory to the baby. It helps Gabe sleep. Jonas does not tell The Giver that he has given away a memory.
The Giver gives Jonas many happy memories, but increasingly painful memories, too. The Giver tells him that when The Receiver-in-training failed ten years ago, after only five weeks, the memories she had received were released, and everyone had access to them. “It was chaos,” he says. Jonas wonders aloud what would happen to the community if anything happened to him. He has been receiving memories for nearly a year. “If they lost you, with all the training you’ve had now, they’d have all those memories again themselves,” The Giver says. “They wouldn’t know how to deal with it at all.” “The only way I deal with it is by having you there to help me,” Jonas says. That gives The Giver an idea.
Jonas then tells The Giver that his father was going to release a newborn twin that morning. Jonas’s concept of release is that the person is sent to Elsewhere. The Giver tells Jonas that he thinks he should watch the video of that release. Jonas watches on the video screen as his father inserts a needle
into a baby’s forehead. He listens to his father’s cheerful voice say, “All done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He watches the baby die. His mind reels. The Giver tells him, “They can’t help it. They know nothing.” He explains that feelings are not part of the life they’ve learned, that he and Jonas are the only ones in the community who have feelings.
That evening, The Giver tells Jonas that “having you here with me over the past year has made me realize that things must change…. Now for the first time I think there might be a way.” They make a plan for The Giver to help Jonas to escape, so that the people will live with memories again. Jonas is sure the plan will work. But when he goes home, he learns that the Committee has decided to release Gabe the next morning. Jonas knows then that he has to flee right away, without The Giver’s help. In the middle of the night Jonas straps Gabe into the child seat on the back of his father’s bicycle. Then he pedals away from the community, toward Elsewhere. Jonas’s only regret is that he does not get to say good-bye to The Giver.
Jonas rides hard through the night, knowing that daylight will bring knowledge of his and Gabe’s disappearance. At dawn he stops in an isolated field where he and Gabe eat and then sleep. They go on like this for days, bicycling through the night, sleeping during the day. He is very afraid now, afraid that he and Gabe will starve. He wonders briefly if, finally given a choice to make, he made the wrong one. Then, when he thinks of Gabe, he knows he had no choice. He had to flee.
Jonas and Gabe continue their journey, hungry and increasingly cold. Jonas feels certain that he is reaching his destination. Then, as he trudges up a snow-covered hill carrying the baby inside his tunic, he feels he knows what is waiting for him at the top. “We’re almost there, Gabriel,” he tells the baby. Somehow Jonas knows that a sled will be waiting at the top of the hill, and it is. Jonas climbs on and, holding tight to Gabriel, sets off down the hill. He sees lights in the distance. And, for the first time, he hears people singing.
Source: Scholastic
Setting is one of the elements of a narrative. It includes the place, time and social context of a story and helps to establish the mood.
SETTING – A WORLD OF RULES
The Giver is a science-fiction novel that takes place in a “very different culture and time,” Lowry says. The author establishes the book’s unusual setting in a number of ways. One way Lowry establishes the book’s setting is by making Jonas’s world one full of rules, some familiar, others totally strange. There are rules about keeping feelings hidden, about having more than two children-one male, one female-in each family unit, and about bragging, among other things. There are so many rules, in fact, that each household has the community’s Book of Rules as one of the three books that it is allowed to-and required to-own.
SETTING – WORDS & VOCABULARY
Lowry also places readers in unfamiliar territory with the words she uses to describe things that are familiar to us. For instance, a family becomes a family unit, a home becomes a dwelling, and a stuffed animal becomes a comfort object.
In addition to making the familiar unfamiliar with her use of words, Lowry uses capitalization to remove the reader from any familiar time and place. The author capitalizes the names of important events and ceremonies, such as the Naming, when newchildren are given their names and the Ceremony of Twelve, when children are given their lifetime work Assignments. Lowry also capitalizes words that identify people’s positions in the community. For instance, Jonas’s dad is a Nurturer, Jonas is a Twelve, the man who trains him is The Receiver, then The Giver.
SETTING – LIFE MAPPING
Another way Lowry establishes her unfamiliar setting is by giving the reader a community in which people’s lives are mapped out for them from birth to death. A baby is raised in the Nurturing Center. At the December ceremony it is Named and delivered to his or her new family unit. Each successive December that child moves up to the next age group and assumes that group’s rights and responsibilities. At the Ceremony of Twelve the child will be assigned his or her lifelong job in the community. Eventually, an adult may apply to receive a spouse. Then the Committee of Elders monitors the couple for three years before allowing the spouses to apply for children. Once their children are grown, the spouses move into a group home, where they live with other Childless Adults. Eventually, when they are old enough, they go to live at the House of the Old, where they live out their final days, until they are released from the community.
SETTING – NO PRIVACY
Lowry also establishes the uniqueness—and eeriness—of her setting by showing that there is no privacy. There is always someone watching you, and someone listening to you. The reader sees that Jonas is being watched when the boy recalls an incident when he took an apple home from the recreation area and, later, hears this public announcement: “ATTENTION. THIS IS A REMINDER TO MALE ELEVENS THAT OBJECTS ARE NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THE RECREATION AREA AND THAT SNACKS ARE TO BE EATEN, NOT HOARDED.” The speakers in each home are not just for public announcements, they are for private listening. So when family members are required to share feelings and dreams with one another, they are also sharing them with whomever is listening in at the other end of that speaker. The only person who can turn off this speaker and listening device is The Receiver, or The Giver, as Jonas comes to call him.
SETTING – SAMENESS & FAMILIARITY
Jonas’s world is also a place that Lowry makes different by making it all the same. The Giver tells Jonas that before the community chose to go to Sameness there were hills, there was snow, there were colours. Many of the differences we take for granted in our world are missing from Jonas’s. Lowry uses all of the above and more to turn a world that is familiar—a world where children go to school, play catch, ride bikes, get annoyed at little sisters, snuggle stuffed animals, and coo at babies—into a world that is terribly strange.
CHARACTERS
There are about ten speaking characters in this book. The two main characters are Jonas and The Giver. Other important characters are Gabriel, Jonas’s father, and Jonas’s best friend, Asher.
Here is a list of characters:
- Jonas – a boy turning twelve
- The Giver – the person who holds the memories of the world
- Gabriel – a baby Jonas grows to love, called Gabe
- Father – Jonas’s father
- Mother – Jonas’s mother
- Lily – Jonas’s younger sister
- Asher – Jonas’s best friend
- Fiona – Jonas’s friend
- Larissa – a woman in the House of the Old
- Chief Elder – the leader of the community
THEMES
Some of the themes in The Giver could be centred around:
- Connections
- Choice
- Freedom and Security
- Sameness and Diversity
- Individuality
- Honesty
- Family
NARRATIVE ELEMENTS OF PROSE FICTION
This lesson will explore the ‘big picture’ elements of analysing prose fiction.
Find out about narrative purpose, structure, setting, perspective and characterisation. You’ll discover that narratives are strongly influenced by genre and context.
SETTING
To understand more about setting, watch the following video:
Setting includes the place, time, and social context. Also examined is the way setting is connected to the other elements of fiction.
CHARACTER
Characters are an important element of a narrative as their actions help to drive the plot forward.
Characterisation – SAAO Model
Consider how Lois Lowry constructs characters through their speech, action,appearance and interactions with other characters. How does this influence your understanding and opinion of the character?
Speech –
What does the character say, think and feel? How do they speak?
Actions –
What does the character do? How do they behave? How does the character act in different situations?
Appearance –
How is the character described in terms of their physical attributes, clothing and facial expressions?
Others –
How does the character treat others? What relationship do they have with other characters? What do others think of them?
THEME
“A theme is an important idea that is woven throughout a story. It’s not the plot or the summary, but something a little deeper. A theme links a big idea about our world with the action of a text” (Khan Academy, 2020).
Wider Reading