The Giver von Lois Lowry. Textanalyse und Interpretation. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial. Lois Lowry

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       In 1979 Lois is working as a journalist and is sent to write an article about a painter who lives on a remote island off the coast of Maine. In talking to the painter she learns that his capacity for seeing colour is much greater than her own. She takes a photograph of him which she keeps above her desk. Years later she learns that he has gone blind. She wishes at times “that he could have somehow magically given me the capacity to see the way he did”. This is evidently a key moment in the development of the idea which became The Giver.

       In 1989 she goes to Germany because one of her sons is getting married there. The ceremony is in German, which she doesn’t understand, but one section is in English, and she reflects on how “we are all each other’s people now”. The sense of community and oneness, Sameness, even, is present here in this memory: “Can you feel that this memory, too, is a stream that is now entering the river?”

       Later, her father is in his late 80s and in a nursing home. He is surrounded by photographs of his family, and at one point he points to Lois’ older sister Helen, who had died very young of cancer, and says that he can’t remember what happened to her. “We can forget pain, I think. And it is comfortable to do so. But I also wonder briefly: is it safe to do that, to forget? That uncertainty pours itself into the river of thoughts which will become the book.”

       In 1991 she is giving a talk about her book Number the Stars (about the Holocaust) and a woman in the audience asks her “Why do we have to tell this Holocaust thing over and over? Is it really necessary?” She replies to the woman by quoting her German daughter-in-law, who says: “No one knows better than we Germans that we must tell this again and again.” But later, Lowry says, she played Devil’s advocate by asking herself; wouldn’t it actually be “a more comfortable world” if the Holocaust was forgotten? “And I remember once again how comfortable, familiar and safe my parents had sought to make my childhood by shielding me from ELSEWHERE. But I remember, too, that my response had been to open the gate again and again.” This is another key to the growth of the story and themes of The Giver.

       The next memory is of her having lunch with her daughter in a pub. A news story comes on the TV about a mass shooting incident having just occurred: when she hears that it’s in another state, far away from where they’re sitting, she’s relieved. Her daughter is shocked by her reaction. “How comfortable I made myself feel for a moment, by reducing my own realm of caring to my own familiar neighbourhood. How safe I deluded myself into feeling.” This is another important tributary to the river, which is “turbulent by now, and clogged with memories and thoughts and ideas that begin to mesh and intertwine. The river begins to seek a place to spill over.”

       Her daughter, who had been so horrified by her reaction to the mass shooting, was the first person to read the manuscript of The Giver.

       The “different” girl from college is happily living with another woman now.

       Her son and German daughter-in-law now have a daughter, “who will be the receiver of all of their memories”.

       The photograph she took of the old painter she interviewed who went blind was used as the cover for the first edition of the book in the USA (see p. 26).

       The first seven chapters can be treated as a kind of introduction to this strange world.

       The plot begins in chapter eight, when Jonas is selected as the new Receiver of Memory.

       We will look more at the structure and organisation of the narrative of The Giver in the chapter in this study guide on 3.3 Structure (p. 42).