The Giver: a review

I don’t really get The Giver. I read it in third/fourth grade in Shanghai, and I read it again recently to see if anything changed. I watched the movie maybe six years ago too. I still don’t quite get it.

If you read it as social commentary on the concept of collectivism, where everyone is the same and without emotion, life becomes without colour, and the horrors inflicted on individuals are heinous, I think that it’s weak at best. Especially since this is a novel study for so many young readers, I think it introduces the concept of considering the needs of a community through a very biased entry point and establishes it unfairly. The language is dry, and the concepts are dry like cereal. Stale.

In the more general sense, you can read it as a balance of pleasure and pain in life (and the limited “idyllic” feelings ignorance provides). We’re capable of experiencing such love joy envy sadness and other emotions. Jonas’s Community is incapable of seeing colour, or feeling anything. They only live to graduate, then to work, and to serve their duties to the Community. So when Jonas eventually feels pain, he feels it so strongly, scraped and raw, twisting in pain, tears in his eyes. But it’s fresh. When we’ve gone through shitty low times in the past, in the moment we didn’t think we’d get through it and feel the joys to come, but without those low times, there are no high times. Pain and suffering is valid. It’s so tiring that life is constant ups and downs and scrambling to find meaning or adjusting to new environments. Why can’t we be happy forever? — until that happiness becomes a sense of complacency and a lack of feeling. But the act of struggling and processing and being emotionally vulnerable brings the very feeling of happiness. So yeah, pain brings us a spectrum of emotions, and savouring a spectrum is what happiness ultimately is.

I still didn’t like it.