Jonas, along with the rest of his community, lives in a perfect society. Adults are assigned family units along with a spouse. Children celebrate communal birthdays in which they walk across a stage and receive the next token of their maturity. Everyone lives a faultless, conflict-free life, oblivious to how morally incorrect their society truly is.

The awaited day has come for Jonas to walk across the stage and receive his assigned Job in the ceremony of 12, marking the end of his childhood and labeling him as an adult.  Jonas soon learns his assignment comes with intolerable pain, overwhelming emotion, and memories of a past nobody knew existed.

The highly intriguing theme - the importance of memory - leaves readers questioning, what is the importance of memory? There is no justified answer to this question, instead there is a sea of potential answers written within the heart-wrenching text itself.

In an interview with NPR, Lois Lowry said The Giver was inspired by her father who had lost his long term memory. She believed that if people were incapable of having memories, then pain is virtually non-existent. This lead her to draft The Giver in which the members of the community do not experience emotional pain or remember a time when there was such a thing.

I’ve never read a book quite like this one. From beginning to end, each paragraph sprouts a new idea that was not apparent before. Often throughout my reading of the book, I found myself growing more and more attached to the main character. I progressed through the chapters feeling compassion and pity for Jonas as though he could feel the same for me. The ending of this book is so thought provoking that I am still trying to answer the open ended question: what is the importance of memory? Although my answer is far from the only one, I have temporarily concluded that the importance of memory is to hold together the fundamentals of a morally correct society.

I highly recommend this book to any reader capable of understanding the intention the author had in writing it. Ages of all varieties will leave with a different outlook of the book’s theme, but all are equal when it comes to provoking thought in readers. As the novel’s main character’s mind inherits the teachings of his assignment, you become distressed as if you were watching a loved one go through an unfortunate scenario. Yet you are left ultimately satisfied by Jonas’s willpower and his determination to free himself from the perfectly choreographed community that bonds him.

Ulaby, Neda. “Lois Lowry Says ‘The Giver’  Was Inspired by Her Father’s Memory Loss.” npr 16 August 2014.