The Giver 723Fate in The Giver
In the opening of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, the pro-
tagonist Jonas is worrying about his future. Shortly, a
group of Elders from his community will announce
their decisions regarding the job placement of Jonas
and his 12-year-old peers. As Jonas so precisely states,
he is not frightened but apprehensive about the
choice they will make for him. Jonas’s apprehension
arises because he has no input in this process; some-
one else will be making one of the most important
decisions of his life. In fact, someone else will make
every major decision in Jonas’s life; the Elders have
already chosen his parents and sibling, they will select
his future job, and when he comes of age they will
provide him with a pre-determined wife and children.
Choice, even in everyday life, has been mostly elimi-
nated for the majority of people in Jonas’s community.
The idea of choice is ultimately bound up in how
the theme of fate operates in The Giver. Broadly, there
are two traditional ways of thinking about fate. The
first is that fate is pre-destined; people cannot alter
or change their destinies. The Elders of Jonas’s com-
munity are a personification of this type of fate. Since
the Elders make everyone’s major life-decisions, this
gives the impression that fate is unchangeable and
that people have to submit to the choices made for
them. The people in the community are conditioned
not to desire choice; as a product of his upbringing,
Jonas also feels this way at first. He believes that “we
don’t dare to let people make choices of their own”
because “we really have to protect people from the
wrong choices.” As a future Elder, Jonas can see some
good in taking away choice from the people.
However, there is another way of thinking about
fate that challenges Jonas’s previously held beliefs,
which is the view that fate is changeable and can
be influenced by personal decisions. Jonas realizes
this as a possibility only after he begins his training
as the new Receiver of Memory. When the Giver
begins transmitting memories from the past, Jonas
comprehends that another way of life is possible.
This causes some confusion for Jonas, because he
both perceives positive reasons to let people have
control over their fates, and also recognizes that it
could be dangerous. Yet, when Jonas discovers the
community’s dark secret of mandatory Release (kill-
ing) of twins, abnormal children, and the elderly, he
decides that people should have a right to make their
own choices. Together with the Giver, he makes a
plan to bring memories, and therefore choice, back
to the people. In effect, Jonas wants people to have
control over their own fates.
Although he and the Giver had carefully con-
structed a plan to return memories to the whole
community, Jonas takes emergency action when he
finds out that Gabriel, a baby that had been living
with his family, has been scheduled for Release.
Hastily, Jonas takes Gabriel in the middle of the
night and leaves the community. In an attempt to
change his own fate, as well as that of the commu-
nity, Jonas hopes that once he is gone his memories
will go back to the people. However, alone and with
no support, limited supplies, and a young child to
care for, Jonas ironically begins questioning if he
made the right choice: “Once he had yearned for
choice. Then, when he had had a choice, he had
made the wrong one: the choice to leave. And now
he was starving.” Yet, even as he longs for the com-
fort of Sameness, Jonas continues to believe in the
redemptive power of choice.
The ending of the novel, in which Jonas suffers
from forces outside of his control (such as treacher-
ous weather and starvation) again calls into question
how much power a person can have over his or her
own fate. The ambiguous ending does not reveal if
Jonas reaches Elsewhere and safety; in other words,
the reader never knows if Jonas’s real fate is the one
that he wanted. Lowry never discloses if people can
really have control over their fates or if our destinies
are all pre-determined. However, what remains clear
throughout the novel is that the artificial fate cre-
ated by the Elders for the people in the community
should never be tolerated. While people may have
control over their own fate, these decisions should
not be left up to other people.
Cheryl Blake PriceScience and technoloGy in The Giver
In the futuristic society that Lois Lowry creates
in The Giver, science and technology play a subtle
but important role in shaping the story. Although
there have been many scientific advances, Jonas lives
in a community that is not dependent on science.
Much of the technology in this society—computers,