(part 1 of 4) 1994: THE GIVER by Lois Lowry
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
“Everybody makes mistakes. We were too optimistic, or too ruthless, or not ruthless enough.”
-from You Bright And Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann
"I can see the future, it's a real dark place."
-The Mountain Goats
Maybe you read Fahrenheit 451 your sophomore year of high school, or maybe you read 19841 or Brave New World your junior year of high school, and learned about dystopian literature and the message it had criticizing totalitarianism and mob mentality. Or maybe in the 2010s, you read a bunch of books like The Hunger Games or Divergent because that genre of dark teen dystopia was really popular. I've read all of those. And before I read all of those, I read The Giver.
Lois Lowry's 1994 medalist - her second one in a five-year period - remains one of the most influential Newbery medalists of all time, and one of the most influential works of children's literature of at least the past fifty years, as it basically invented, or least re-invented, the genre of YA Dystopia. Millions of copies are in print, academics have written dissertations on it, it has been re-adapted as a film, a stage play, and a graphic novel. Given that the Newbery committee loves giving the medal to works of historical fiction (just of the ones we've read so far: Johnny Tremain, Caddie Woodlawn, The Witch Of Blackbird Pond, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, The Bronze Bow, The Door In The Wall, Dead End In Norvelt, King Of The Wind), it was, notably, the first winner in the 72-year history of the medal that was set in the future. And it continues to stand head-and-shoulders above the other works it influenced, almost thirty years later.
The Giver is set in an unspecified time in the future in a mysterious, heavily-planned community. Our protagonist, Jonas, is about to turn twelve, at which point he will be assigned a job in the community for the rest of his life. Everything is assigned in Jonas' community: your spouse, your name, your job, all of that is chosen for you by a distant Council of Elders. It mostly seems to work: there's no suffering in Jonas' world, no pain, no anger, no loss, no hunger, no poverty, no crime, no political upheaval, no environmental decay, no expensive health insurance. The things I worry about for my children have all been eliminated in Jonas's world.
Jonas receives the rare assignment of becoming the community's "Receiver of Memory", an enigmatic and secretive job only given to one community member in generations, a job where Jonas will eventually grow to lead the council of elders. Jonas meets the current Receiver - well, now that man is the Giver - and learns more: the Giver is going to osmotically transfer memories to Jonas, memories that pre-date Jonas's life, or the Giver's life, or the lives of previous Givers stretching back (and back and back) generations. Jonas will hold these memories, the distant memories of the whole world, as his own. He'll do this for the council of elders, in case they ever need to reference these ancient memories while doing their ongoing work running and planning the community.
Those memories, of course, are of our world today, the one you live in right now as you read The Giver. Before that's revealed, it's still pretty obvious to the reader that there's plenty about Jonas' painless and polite world that is very, very wrong.
Since The Giver is, among all well-known works of dystopian literature, pitched at the youngest audience, it often serves as a reader's first introduction to the genre, and to the concept of "dystopia" in general2. So it's worth looking at what, in Lowry's mind, counts as a dystopia.
As you figured from the earlier paragraphs, choice, just as an overall concept, has been eradicated from Jonas' community. The inciting incident of the novel is Jonas being assigned his job, because everybody gets assigned their job to keep the community running. Every home has meals delivered at the same time every day. Every child is dressed identically, based on their age cohort, and they all learn to ride bicycles at their ninth birthday. Jonas' parents are married to each other because they applied for spouses and were assigned to each other. More ominously, Jonas is their son because they applied for children and were assigned him as an infant; Jonas is not their biological child, but was born to someone else in the community who had been assigned the job of "Birthmother". After Jonas, a young adolescent, has a sexually charged dream, he is assigned pills to quell his "Stirrings", and it turns out that every member of the community, since puberty, has been taking these pills every day to level out their emotions and desires. This is all part of a broader project to impose capital-S "Sameness" across the community, ultimately for the purpose of reducing inequality and suffering.
Obviously, that list got progressively scarier as I went on. In this world there is no individuality. There is no desire, sexual or otherwise. There is no art, no philosophy or morality, no tough questions, no differences of opinion. This is an aseptic, sterile world. Young readers get assigned this book and are told "this world is not like ours, it's worse", which is true.
Except, however, that everything in this world also works.
When I say everything "works" in Jonas' world, I don't mean that it's a good world or somewhere I'd want to live. But everything that's supposed to happen happens when it's supposed to. The community's system of Sameness isn't falling apart, it's working exactly as it's designed. People are good at their jobs. The assigned spouses really do get along with each other. Meal deliveries happen without any delays. The kids really do learn to ride their bikes together. Everyone is polite and respectful to each other. Nobody wants for anything.
Think about this in the context of other fictional dystopias you've seen, especially in recent years. In The Hunger Games, massive inequality led to a rebellion of the poorer classes which ultimately failed and led to a brutal ongoing crackdown by the government; Panem is built on war, starvation, and a giant entertainment spectacle to distract from the war and starvation. You read that and you think "yeah, okay, I can kind of see how the world could get to that point". In Mad Max: Fury Road, the world is parched and irradiated from environmental degradation and nuclear fallout, leading to bloody tribal conflicts for control of water and gasoline; that world is built on car crashes and thirst. You watch that and you think "okay, I can definitely see how the world could get to that point". In Snowpiercer, we tried to fix the climate crisis, failed, accidentally froze the earth over, and had to cram ourselves onto a train, keeping the luxurious front cars for the wealthy and holding the poor at gunpoint in the caboose; that world is built on sub-zero temperatures and claustrophobia. You watch that and, depending on the day, think "okay, this kind of feels like our best-case scenario right now". All three of these dystopias are the result of human society failing to fix its deep underlying problems and descending into hell. And in The Giver, this community decided they wanted to end human suffering, and they just did, and now everyone gets along. The Giver himself details, throughout the novel, the challenges that his community successfully eliminated generations ago:
"Snow made growing food difficult, limited the agricultural periods. And unpredictable weather made transportation almost impossible at times. It wasn’t a practical thing, so it became obsolete when we went to Sameness…the strongest memory that came was hunger. It came from many generations back. Centuries back. The population had gotten so big that hunger was everywhere. Excruciating hunger and starvation. It was followed by warfare."
As we'll see in a second, Lowry's thesis is, very obviously, that the community paid too high a price to eliminate these things, but the fact is that they still pulled it off. We have war and starvation in our world, and they don't. And while Jonas starts out Receiving some fun memories - sledding down a hill, seeing a rainbow - it's the memories of things like war and starvation that the Giver considers most important for Jonas' education. Jonas needs to know how bad the world, our world, once was.
Now, when I said the community paid "too high a price" to get to this point, the price is that they secretly kill everyone who doesn't conform to the standards of the community.
A climactic moment about two-thirds into the novel reveals the truth, that Jonas' community is only painless and perfect because it's actually a eugenics-fueled hellscape. Newborns who don't make weight, can't sleep through the night, or are otherwise judged to be genetically deficient, are quickly euthanized. Anyone who racks up enough infractions of the community rules is also euthanized. For most of the novel, this is referred to as "Release" and believed by Jonas - and presumably a child reader - to be punishment by exile; as an adult reader, it's a little easier for you to guess "oh yeah, Release, they're probably taking them out back and shooting them in the head" and you'd basically be correct. In what is infamously one of the most hard-to-read scenes in any children's novel, Jonas watches a closed-circuit feed of his father, who works as a caregiver in the community's nursery, euthanize - or "Release" - an infant for having too low a birth weight.
It's probably obvious by this point, but: this is about a thousand times darker than the other Newbery medalists we've read. The Giver is consistently on the list of most challenged books in schools and libraries, with the challenges usually driven by the novel's dark subject matter - after all, one of the major plot points is that everyone in the novel is forced to take Anti-Horny Pills3 - including its very explicit depiction of an infanticide. So when Jonas learns that Gabriel, another infant in the nursery to whom he's become attached, is slated for Release as well, Jonas realizes that it may be time to steal baby Gabriel and escape the community for good. And as he escapes and hides from his pursuers, he reflects:
"At dawn, the orderly, disciplined life he had always known would continue again, without him. The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain, or past."
Jonas’ world is hell, but it continues running tight as a drum. The births, bike rides, job assignments, meal deliveries, and deaths all happen on time as expected. Is that really a dystopia? Does that count as “dystopia”? Nothing is falling apart, nobody is starving, the planet isn’t frying, nothing seems to be running out of resources, the economy appears to be pretty stable, there are no mass shootings, there’s no poverty, no homelessness, everyone in the government seems to get along with each other. I mean, hell, it’s not like…well, it’s not like here.
There’s another maybe-not-exactly-dystopian novel from 1987, it’s called You Bright And Risen Angels, it was the debut novel by one of my favorite authors, William T. Vollmann. It’s extremely dense and I’ve only gotten through it once after five tries and I still don’t understand it, and I’ll have to go back through it again some day. It’s kind of about mankind going to war with all of the insects of Earth, although the book is very obviously meant as a complex political allegory, I’m just not sure what the allegory is supposed to point to, because nothing in the war seems to make sense and everyone is just switching sides and changing reasons for fighting each other and it’s just one big mass of blood and confusion out there, for pretty much the entire novel. But oh boy, there’s one passage that leaves you with absolutely no confusion at all. It’s 623 pages in - almost towards the end - and it’s a two-page chapter titled “World In A Jar”, where the action basically stops, the characters all drop out, and Vollmann starts describing a jar of fruit flies:
“At the bottom of their enclosure was a smooth waxy block of yeast food. This would last them quite awhile; there would still be plenty left when the corpses of dead generations covered it and the clean glass walls were pitted with excrement-dots. What would finally do them in was the steady drying out of that yeast food; for purposes of air circulation the top of the vial was loosely plugged with cotton; and the moisture evaporated steadily, so that eventually all the flies would die of thirst. But this was some weeks in the future, hardly anything to worry about right now.”
And before you can say “hey wait a second that sounds familiar”, Vollmann continues with his metaphor:
“...the larvae took over and grew wings and buzzed about the steadily more polluted vial like traffic helicopters in New York as the cars snorted and farted in the blue-grew air, the yellow taxicabs especially idling and idling and double-parking, pouring out gases, while the flies buzzed and swarmed inside the darkening vial and landed on the yeast food. Now at last you could hardly see into the vial at all, it was so encrusted with fecal dots; and the flies could hardly get to the yeast food because the bottom of the vial was piled so high with dead ones, but they went on buzzing and swarming until the vial dried up completely and then they were still. The vial went into the trash.”
When I read The Giver, I’m really not scared that our world is going to end up like Lowry’s dystopia at all. There doesn’t seem to be any realistic way for us to get from here to there, it’s a complete fantasy with no antecedent in today’s world. I think it’s the most comforting dystopia I’ve ever read, and “World In A Jar” is the least comforting. I’m very scared that, instead of arriving in the world from The Giver, we’re walking into the dystopia we deserve.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the first of four installments on Lois Lowry's 1994 medalist, The Giver.
George Orwell, a BBC journalist who fought against fascists in the Spanish Civil War and advocated for democratic socialism in his nonfiction writing, is best known for writing 1984 to highlight the brutal persecution of College Republican groups at American liberal arts colleges with "safe spaces".
I used to work with a junior high teacher who, as part of his The Giver unit, had his students watch M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village, which isn’t a dystopian story exactly, but is about a highly planned community making controversial choices in the name of eliminating suffering. Weirdly, while The Village doesn’t have a lot in common with The Giver, it has an almost identical plot as a different children’s novel, Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out Of Time, which was published in 1995. Both novels are better than The Village by a mile.
My term, not Lowry’s.