The Giver (1993)
By Lois Lowry
Genetic engineering; Genetic memory; Young adult
When Jonas turns twelve, he is selected to receive the memories of his highly regulated community -- and the process reveals disturbing truths about his origins.
As he approaches the ceremony that will mark his Twelve year, Jonas begins to feel apprehensive of the lifestyle changes that will mark his transition into adulthood. In Jonas’s highly regulated community, citizens are assigned their adult occupations during annual Twelve ceremony. Jonas, like his peers, has been monitored by the community elders for the past several years, so that they may determine what role he should play in the community. His father, for instance, is a Nurturer, a caregiver for the newchildren who have not yet been assigned to families. This community is governed by strict rules: each couple may only have two children (one boy, one girl), which they must apply for; sexual desire is suppressed; families share their dreams and emotions so that all conflict can be resolved. Jonas knows that he is different from the rest of the community from the moment that he begins to “see beyond,” and this ability contributes to his selection as the Receiver of the Memories. Only one child in a generation is assigned this role, and Jonas soon learns the critical nature of his new occupation. He gleans from the previous Receiver – now, the Giver – the whole of human experience that existed before the community came into being, from the sublimity of sunshine to the misery of war. The community has opted for lifestyle stability they call Sameness, and can only achieve this Sameness as long as there is a vessel to hold the memories of disruptive experiences. With his new knowledge, however, Jonas finds himself increasingly isolated, and when his foster sibling is about to be “released” for his inability to behave properly, Jonas decides to commit the greatest transgression: escaping the community.
While this young adult novel does not deal directly with genetic engineering, it does evoke questions about the results of scientific intervention into genetic inheritance. Jonas’s community, and others like his, strive for Sameness and must sacrifice color, emotion, even landscape and climate differentials in order to maintain a stable community. Jonas questions his predecessors’ decision to achieve Sameness at such a cost, since he learns to value both the painful and pleasant memories he obtains from the Giver. Another expense of Sameness is the releasing process, in which children who might threaten social stability – by overextending resources or expressing disturbing behaviors – are killed. The Giver hints that the Sameness of the community has been manufactured in a genetics laboratory, with the only recognizable difference emerging in the occasional light-eyed individual; skin tone and hair color has been normalized throughout the community. The greatest intervention, however, is the community members’ incapacity to recognize difference in a way that might interrupt smooth communal functioning. While this form of genetic engineering might produce sociopolitical stability, Jonas begins to see this as a shadow of true existence; he learns to believe that the worth of existence lays not in precise engineering of people or environment, but in natural conflicts that evoke spontaneous emotion.
Evaluation: This novel would be a useful introduction to inheritance for teen-aged readers. It should help young adults contemplate how many of our traits are environmentally influenced, and how many result from genetic programming.
– Natalie Champ