The Giver Analysis

OK, so what do you think of when you think of red? Fire, passion, and love…exactly. Red is a pretty intense color. Possibly the intense color. So when Jonas starts seeing the color red, he's...

Yeah, our description is pretty vague... but so is the setting in The Giver. We can't be sure when the story goes down, but since the memories of a distant past correspond to our world today, we co...

The Giver is told in the third person, but focuses exclusively on Jonas. We know what he's thinking and feeling, and we don't enter into anyone else's head. The narrative often just goes into telli...

Jonas's community is an attempt at a utopia—a perfect society with no pain, suffering, or violence. But, as we see from reading, there are clearly some serious problems here. There's no freedom,...

Lois Lowry explains in her Newbery Medal acceptance speech that she tried to "seduce" the reader. No, not that way—get your minds out of the gutter, Shmoopers. What she means is that she wants to...

The Giver is a rather straightforward narrative, so you won't get bogged down in ornate language or Faulkner-like, page-long sentences. But that doesn't mean that the writing is childish or boringâ...

Lois Lowry isn't playing coy with this title—no Shakespeare or Bible allusions here. (Thanks, Lo!)The term "The Giver" refers to the old man, the former Receiver, who transfers all his memories t...

The ending to The Giver is sort of a "take it how you like it" deal. Either Jonas and Gabriel make it to Elsewhere, everyone is happy, and the world is right as rain, or… they die of exposure/sta...

Jonas is waiting for December.This is how things start off in The Giver. Jonas waits with what, after some deliberation, he identifies to be "apprehension" for this mysterious "Ceremony of Twelve"...

Jonas is named "The Receiver."Our hero doesn't exactly start his ordeal voluntarily. He's "selected," as they say, to bear the burden that the rest of the community would rather not deal with. Bu...

We meet Jonas and are slowly introduced to "the community" and the ways in which it functions. At first, we might be enticed, but it soon becomes clear that it's not such a beautiful day in the ne...

The face on the cover of the book is Carl Nelson, a painter whom Lowry interviewed and wrote about for a magazine she once worked for. She thought he had an amazing capacity to see color—far beyo...