The Giver

The Giver, by Lois Lowry, so I read this book back in the sixth grade, but I genuinely enjoyed rereading the story as an adult. I though that Lowry was able to express in a really smart way how one should be grateful for one's pleasures and misfortunes that life gives us. Lowry does make quite the point when the Giver shows Jonas the difference between superficial pain and real, honest pain. The contrast of no pleasure without pain to compare it to is simply beautiful. The theme of the novel is so complex, but is one that kids can understand so easily. My favorite part is when Jonas is contemplating the idea of love; it seems so insane to think about not being able to feel love, for friends, for parents, or even your children, but Lowry proves to us that love is a privileged emotion for those who are willing to sacrifice comfort and security. It is so painful for the reader to watch how the community can so easily destroy children like Gabriel, just because he is more like an infant from our world. The end of novel is one of the most difficult parts of the story that I think kids will need to grasp in order to comprehend the story. As a kid, I remembered members of my reading group getting mad at me when I indicated that I thought Jonas and Gabe had died at the end of the story; I thought maybe I had misunderstood, and that rereading the book would give me a chance to maybe catch something that perhaps I had missed, but sadly, I see the same outcome as before. Perhaps it is the reader who creates the outcome merely based on how they believe the outcome of a world of sameness will result.

Downward, downward, faster and faster. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and
joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and that they were
waiting,
too, for the baby. For the first time, he heard something that he
knew to
be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances
of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music
too. But perhaps it was only an echo.

(Lowry, 179-180). I believe that the echos were the final memories leaving Jonas, and that the memory of singing to be memories long gone in the after life waiting to embrace Gabe and Jonas as memories themselves, or perhaps they are a mark of the Giver dying as he did keep those as his favorite memories to himself, but I guess it is up to the reader to intemperate.