The Giver
The Giver
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Lois Lowry on The Giver
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A father who forgot his daughterThe book began not with a concept but with a moment of loss Lowry witnessed firsthand. She had assembled a photo album with her brother for their aging father and sat with him as he paged through it. When he reached a photograph of two girls, he recognized one of them as his daughter but could not place the other. The other was her sister Helen, who had died years earlier. He had forgotten her entirely.
When I turned to a page with two little girls, my dad said, ‘Oh, there you are with your sister.’ And then he said, sadly, ‘I can’t remember her name.’ I told him her name was Helen, that she was named for her grandmother. And he said, ‘Whatever happened to her?’
Driving back to the airport afterward, Lowry turned the experience into a question that seemed at first humane and even appealing. Her father was no longer burdened by grief. What if that could be a gift rather than a tragedy?
I started thinking, would it be a good thing if we were able to simply forget everything that makes us sad or scared? And that became the idea for my book.
The question flipped as she examined it. Her father had not merely lost a painful memory. He had lost his daughter a second time, in the only way that still mattered. The grief and the person were the same thing.
Lowry had read dystopian fiction at Brown and found it largely unappealing. When she sat down to write, she was not reaching for a genre. The future setting arrived as a practical necessity once the premise took shape, not as a deliberate choice.
I didn’t intend a dystopian novel. I’ve never been a lover of such literature, though I majored in English at Brown and had to read ‘1984’ and the rest. I was simply going to write about people, a group of people, who had found a way to live without any sadness or fear.
How she wrote it
Building a perfect world to dismantle itWorking from her apartment in Boston, Lowry constructed the community by looking out the window and stripping the world of everything that alarmed her. Car crashes at an intersection below meant no cars. A man panhandling on the corner meant no money and no poverty. She kept removing things until the place felt genuinely desirable, and she described the accumulation of those removals in a Library of Congress talk.
I did away with money. I did away with poverty. And then I did away with divorce. I did away with alcohol. I took out everything that made our lives at that time difficult... and eventually I had a little town that was absolutely perfect. [paraphrased from audio]
The seduction was intentional and, by her own account, worked on her as completely as she hoped it would work on readers. The first third of the book was built to make you want to live there.
Her Newbery acceptance speech, delivered after the book won in 1994, makes explicit what the opening chapters were designed to do. The strategy required her to become a believer in the world she was building before she could begin dismantling it.
In beginning to write The Giver I created — as I always do, in every book — a world that existed only in my imagination — the world of ‘only us, only now.’ I tried to make Jonas’s world seem familiar, comfortable, and safe, and I tried to seduce the reader. I seduced myself along the way. It did feel good, that world. I got rid of all the things I fear and dislike: all the violence, prejudice, poverty, and injustice, and I even threw in good manners as a way of life because I liked the idea of it.
The community’s mechanisms for controlling weather, suppressing color perception, and chemically neutralizing emotion puzzled many readers, particularly young ones who wrote asking for technical explanations. Lowry’s response was a deliberate refusal to engage with the question at all.
And I’m not into technology, so when I reply to letters asking those questions, I tell them I don’t have a clue. You just have to suspend belief and suspend disbelief, and pretend that they were able to do that. If I had tried to get into the science of it, I would’ve failed miserably. So that would’ve been hard but I made it easy by not doing it.
The ending generated its own difficulty. Lowry knew what she believed happened to Jonas, the twelve-year-old boy at the center of the book, but she withheld the resolution from the page. The ambiguity was a choice made for the reader, not a sign of uncertainty on her part.
The ending was a little difficult, because I decided to leave it ambiguous. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how it ended but because I wanted to leave the reader with questions and a certain amount of wonder.
The original cover image came from a photograph Lowry had taken years before the book existed, while working as a journalist on an island off the coast of Maine. She chose it because she loved the face of the old man in the frame, a painter named Carl Nelson. Only after publication did she learn something about him that made the choice feel almost fated.
In the last five years of his life, Carl had been blind. Carl Nelson’s life was filled with color; his paintings were often paintings of flowers, and he was a fabulous gardener. For him to lose color, as The Giver in the book begins to lose color, seemed such a wonderful analogy that I’ve always been glad his photograph is on the cover of the book.
The personal thread
A childhood of ordered, rule-bound placesLowry grew up moving between military bases around the world, environments defined by hierarchy, regulation, and the suppression of individual deviation. She has drawn a direct line between that upbringing and her ability to imagine the community Jonas inhabits without having to reach far for the texture of it.
Yeah, it was removed from the schools in the town of Holland, Michigan, and a town in Colorado... most often there would be a challenge, then there would be a process, and then there would be a school board meeting, and the book would be reinstated. But in a couple of places it was withdrawn. Beats me why.
The bafflement is dry but real. The book she wrote as a warning against the erasure of difficult experience kept getting removed from shelves by communities discomfited by its content. The irony is not subtle.
What she wants us to sit with
The question the book refuses to answer for youLowry has consistently declined to claim full authorship of what the book ultimately means. Readers have found religious allegory, political critique, and psychological architecture in the text, none of which she placed there consciously. Her account of how that happens is a precise statement about the gap between intention and reception.
Clearly, I was subconsciously putting things in — people found political and religious implications. You can’t sit down and plan to do that. If you did, it would fail and would be contrived. What I put into a book is not what the reader takes out of it.
What she did build deliberately was a two-step structure: first the appeal of the community, then the cost of it. Readers who write to her about the book almost always describe the same turning point, the moment the trade-off becomes visible. She has named the central question the book leaves open.
The power in it for people seems to come from the questions that it raises in them about their own world and the world we’ve made and what the world will hold in the future. Readers often share that ‘it would be great to feel so safe and protected. But, uh oh, look what they gave up.’ The Giver makes readers wonder about how we make decisions and weigh things. What do we value more, safety and comfort, or freedom?
Around the time of the 2014 film adaptation, Lowry spoke specifically about her grandsons as the kind of reader she had always had in mind. They were growing up with access to global news, aware of war and upheaval in ways that earlier generations of children were not. The book was partly written for that awareness.
My grandsons now are certainly aware through the media of warfare and terrible things happening around the world. They have a concern, as all young people do, about the future. That’s what the book presents to them. A feeling of how important they are and how important the decisions and choices they’ll make will be, because they’re the ones who are going to be the leaders of the world down the line.
The book does not protect young readers from the weight of that responsibility. It hands the weight to them directly, which is exactly what Lowry says she intended.