6.20 The Great Societies: Lowry’s The Giver – 

 

Choosing Ugliness

You know, I noticed something while we were talking about Metropolis these past two weeks that kind of surprised me. In all the Hideous Bargains we’ve discussed so far–that is, in all of the societies where a privileged few live dependent upon the oppression and suffering of others–everyone is conscious of the Bargain they are living. The people of Omelas are specifically shown the Suffering Child as a weird kind of rite of passage into adulthood. “Here, kid, this is what our people depend upon; you are now part of the pact.” Certainly in the philosophies of William James or Fyodor Dostoevski, the Suffering Child is the very center of the discussion. And in Metropolis, the Upper 10,000 understand fully, it seems, that an under-society of labor slaves away beneath them. 

I don’t know when I first discovered this relationship in my own lifestyle. Anyone living comfortably in the US and enjoying the fruit of global trade is certainly riding on top of oppression somewhere. But even as a teen, I don’t think I understood my connection to it. I mean, I had all of this discretionary cash: money from various jobs and no bills to speak of. So I spent heavily on restaurants, movies, and hobbies. Ice Cream bars at the local A&W; pizza deliveries 24/7 from Pizza Cutter; popcorn and tickets for the latest Spielberg movie; records mailed to me from Columbia House; lead gaming miniatures and paint for whatever RPG we were playing at the time. None of that consumption and pleasure ever struck me as harmful to others, not especially the idea that I even had the money to buy it all. . . . Even though each one of these was touched by global production that certainly used exploited labor. And it’s fully possible that I sneered once or three times at the poor hourly shmucks who had to serve me. Because, you know, as school teachers were always quick to tell me: “Study hard or you’ll end up working in fast food.” Those poor hourly-wage shmucks weren’t me. I studied. 

But what was I learning? Or rather, what wasn’t I being taught? Well, one of the kindest things was to be charitable to those without. Okay. But did I ever ask, “What kind of society allowed them to be impoverished in the first place?” No. Did I believe that all of the poor were, as so many said, just lazy? I don’t think so. But I guess my point is, until I started reading for myself with texts I selected, I don’t think I was ever provoked to ask too many questions. 

It might have been different if I had received a choice of action as the people of Omelas actually get: they are shown the price of their lifestyles, just as anyone who owns slaves or who exploits migrant labor sees each day. Sure, in Le Guin and Dostoevsky and Lang and Poe and King, almost everyone chooses to allow the suffering to continue, and they either live in despair or a compromised morally-bankrupt luxury afterwards. Some “walk away,” some resist and lose, but they are given the choice. 

But if the schools don’t reveal it, and the rest of a semi-literate culture distracts me with ice cream bars and Reese’s candy from ET, how am I expected to make a choice that I don’t really know exists? In Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, four walls of television and the burning of books creates a compliant population, one which will follow the Emperor, to use Achebe’s image. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the victims themselves are given indoctrination over literacy, and this supposedly encourages the suffering to accept their fate. In Orwell, nearly the same thing occurs, with the very language being cut away so as to limit the possibilities for thought. In Scott Westerfield’s The Uglies series, young people all undergo cosmetic surgery which (bonus!) includes brain lesions which partly lobotomize their capacity to think clearly. 

And of course, in Jemison’s Um-Helat of her story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” knowledge of the potential for suffering provokes the execution of those who cannot set aside the tainted ideologies. The Suffering Child does not exist there, but the idea of it does, at least among the elites. And so the average citizen in Jemisin’s story lives a utopic life, in villages that care for one another and thrive with happy work and play. But they never know about even the potential for a suffering child. When we read Jemisin, we are meant to worry about the execution of those with broken or tainted thoughts and refuse “treatment.” We are not meant to ask a more basic question: Isn’t the significance of the entire question itself reliant upon our opportunity to, you know,  . . . . choose?

 

Intro Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I’m wondering if humans can be trusted with morality. 

Evasion Modeling

Let’s put all this another way. We’ve been looking at what to do about the Suffering Child, the price the people of Omelas (or surprise, all of us) pay to live lives of some imbalanced quality and comfort. We could describe Le Guin’s society as trading on its suffering; the suffering that creates the wonders of Omelas is utilitarian in nature; it’s an exchange: “Hey, kid, we let you suffer so that we can enjoy life.” Utility. Exchange. Capitalist trade.

Jemisin’s Um-Helot is more a revolutionary bloodshed approach: we will build our wonderful society by literally cutting away everything ugly which doesn’t fit.

And, not that I buy into this, we might have Harbou and Lang’s “compromise” model, that if the two sides (sufferer and oppressor) simply have more empathy or Heart for each other, everything can just keep buzzing along happily. Um, yeah.

But the Hideous Bargain is a terrible choice, any way you approach it. Nobody likes it. So what if? What if we just eliminated our knowledge that the choice existed at all? Oh, there are a lot of ways to do it. You could do what my old American schooling did: stick to quadratic formulas and parsing syntax and how to play badminton. Never ask the question: operate as if there were no trouble at all, Solla Sollew. 

Or we could do better, still. I did find out, remember, as did Le Guin and Jemisin and Dostoevsky and the rest. All we really need to do is find some means to guarantee we all stay ignorant of the hideous trade-off. Some way to, I don’t know, enforce the ignorance. Huxley did it by giving his World State, or more specifically the Central London Hatchery, enough drugs that they just don’t think to ask. (“Soma, Soma”)

And Lois Lowry in her YA novel The Giver gives her Community dwellers drugs, too, as part of the strategy. After all, those in charge of The Community want what’s best for everyone: to create a utopic place of peace where no suffering need be recognized.

And so we create a kind of society of sameness, where everyone takes a daily pill that suppresses strong feelings completely–we need not feel pain because we feel no real desire. More, we erase our historical memory of all the pain and injustice of what went on before: we no longer understand what war was, or poverty, or love, or music, or even the concept of color. Nothing which might stir up our emotions. For those who remember, even sexual desire is called “The Stirrings,” an image of imbalance and one that keeps all this rated G or maybe PG. Nobody dies in The Community, but instead they are “released,” the old, and well, the you-know, the babies who aren’t really that good or that healthy–no need for that kind of suffering to be out there–and, oh yes, the–well, the folks who don’t like anything I just described. They’re released. We’ll call them transgressors.  

This is a bit more assertive than Jemisin’s secret policing of social ignorance, but Lowry makes more plain what Jemisin, I think, kind of skirts over. Yes, there is a kind of terrible meeting with pain and suffering; but no, the mental castration we must exercise on everyone to end discomfort (Huxley and Lowry’s drugs, Westerfield’s brain lesions, Steve’s insulated education, oh and let’s not forget Burgess’s Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange), seems not worth the price. 

We don’t have to belabor this, though, do we? Each of these authors are on the same page: that somewhere beneath the social coercions, human choice remains something, eh, “sacred” to the essence of what it means to be human. And, just because we are ignorant of the injustice and suffering in the world, that by no means solves the suffering; it just evades the moral consequence for it. Not utilitarianism or revolutionary bloodshed or compromise, but evasion of culpability. Like the Poe/Bataille resignation to our capacity for horror, our authors here all reject Evasion as an earnest proposal. 

 

Meaning and Politics in The Giver

The Giver, too, is plainly a political novel, though, as we saw with Metropolis, not always explicitly so from each of our four frameworks for meaning-making. Those were the author’s intention, the text itself, the context, and the reader’s perspective.

For Lowry herself, she has acknowledged openly that there is an “important analogy” in The Giver, though she never speaks directly of what this is. Instead, as she says in an interview from the mid-1990s,

“Teachers, parents, and librarians become the givers of knowledge that children will carry with themselves on whatever journey they take in life.”

And this must be some kind of awakening of its own, because on another occasion she said, 

“Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of The Giver: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.” 

So for Lowry, choice is one of the operative questions at work, along with issues of sameness and comfort. She uses the word “seduction” to describe The Community, and you know, well, comfort and security are seductive. We want an assurance of safety, but prisoners asleep in solitary confinement are also fairly safe. It’s the cost of this comfort that has always been the question we’ve been asking, isn’t it? For Lowry, the trade-off is comfort for freedom, for choice. And that choice includes staring directly at the truth of human ugliness and pain.

Despite Lowry’s stated intentions of freedom and censorship, however, it’s hard not to see some pretty clearly-outlined political positions that move further still when we look at the text itself. We have here a Council of Elders in The Community who plainly regulate just about every facet of behavior 24/7. Professions are chosen for them; spouses are chosen for them; family planning, too. And of course, by making young Jonas the hero of the story, it also makes his principles heroic: independence, liberty, individuality, choice. All this is in contrast to a regimented system where Jonas’s own father kills a newborn out of a kind of bureaucratic necessity to duty. 

Jonas himself wrestles with these issues. When he gets a single taste of what choice looks like, he immediately panics and wonders what would happen if people could choose and (*gasp*) chose wrong? And then, before he awakens to the danger, he reasons, “We really have to protect people from wrong choices,” a conclusion he will reject soon enough. When he asks his parents if they love him, his mother describes the word as “inappropriate.” And his father finds appropriate substitutes like “enjoys” or “takes pride in.” Love is obviously too chaotic. When Jonas confronts the Giver about his father’s killing the baby, he says only that his father is ignorant, not evil. The Giver talks about Jonas’s friend Fiona and says of her, “feelings are not part of the life she’s learned.” For them, then, the act of killing is banal, a bureaucratic banality. 

Ah, and there’s that word again: banality, one that appeared back in our Poe sidetrail and which appears directly in Le Guin’s Omelas story. The treason of the artist; That evil is never wicked or malicious but outrageously dull, bureaucratic, done for duty, without question. We talked about it when considering Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” which Le Guin borrows. Arendt was looking at the efficient killing of the Jews in the Holocaust and described Adolph Eichmann’s evil in this way. We might say of Eichmann, “feelings are not part of the life he’s learned.”

I stretched a bit outside of the text here, but the link is fairly direct, and of course Lowry and The Giver were written just a few decades after Arendt’s idea. In all, though, we have a novel which offers a kind of utopia, an “orderly, predictable, painless” state, but one which requires the “killing” of language, of memory, and of the vulnerable. If we were William James, we would be incapable of a “strenuous mood” or moral outrage, because we would be incapable of recognizing it or reacting to it.

But let’s spend a moment with the context, the space beyond The Giver where it lives. Oh, the ironies here would be delicious if they weren’t so serious. The book by recent count has been challenged over 11,000 times in book ban discussions for libraries in and out of schools. But the reasons! Everything from promoting “socialism,” promoting “euthanasia and infanticide,” and “degrading depictions of motherhood.” Wow. Okay. It sounds like some folks need to improve their reading skills a bit if they think the baby-death scene in the novel is somehow an argument that we should do more of it.

Even so, Lowry had to know that the scene which so jarred Jonas would also affect her audience, and it did. And today, the novel’s discussion of control over childbirth mirrors maybe a bit more of present-day debates than most people find comfortable. But these scenes, too, are part of a society’s underpinning reliance upon utility, yes? In order to achieve a society of the greatest good, some suffering must occur. It’s a trade-off where we eliminate the weak or non-compliant, or the elderly who no longer serve a function of production. And I guess no one should be too concerned about it, even enough to challenge it, if they didn’t believe Lowry’s warning. That “contentment without virtue” creates a society incapable of reacting in defense of its own right to choose, its own liberty. In other words, that the novel has created such a stir (not Stirring) is itself an argument for its themes, that those who protest themselves value the right to choose and to act for themselves. The greater ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More too is almost too outrageous to name, but I will: This is 11,000 times people have argued to censor a book which warns against censorship, that signals the danger of societies which too-much want to “protect” people from uncomfortable ideas.

But this shouldn’t surprise anyone. As I’ve already mentioned, The Giver hardly sits by itself, but is in dialogue with a lot of other titles on similar topics: Orwell, Bradbury, Huxley, Atwood, Le Guin, and many more. We can’t miss these connections. 

And fortunately, for you and I as readers now, we don’t. You and I, we’re now coming to a text like Lowry’s with a context of about 20 episodes of talk about this very topic. Heck, this is old hat by now. If we were snarky, we might say of Jonas’s dad that, “Hey, at least he isn’t dependent on the child suffering. They just put it out of its misery.” But the relationship of dependence still exists here, doesn’t it? The society depends upon this eliminating difference and pain. On its erasure. By force.

But there is something else at work on us as readers, isn’t there? It’s not just that Lowry’s book makes such obvious arguments on its own against totalitarian control of individuality, against bureaucratic efficiency, against the loss of individual choice. It’s that these themes work more powerfully still when we consider our Hideous Bargain.

 

Price Tags for Blissful Ignorance

I think we all might agree that trying to escape our moral accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More for the Suffering Child is a shifty tactic, tantamount to wickedness. “I didn’t put him in the closet and keep him there. The mayor I elected did that! I just knew about it!”

Shifty. Or something sounding like it. But this all presumes that the population is even aware that such a choice is being made. And that they are capable of responding to it. What do we say when our fundamental capacity to think and choose is reduced, crippled, or never nurtured to maturity in the first place? How did Le Guin say it? That “happiness is something rather stupid.” 

Look. Jonas, our Giver hero, is chosen to carry all the memory of the culture himself, alone. This includes history, pain, and the rest of it. He’s a strange sort of honored scapegoat, a trash bin for all of their past sins and troubles and pain, set apart from society, so that they can be cleansed of the burden of thinking deeply or choosing anything much at all. Unlike Omelas, where everyone knows the price that is being paid, here Jonas alone knows. And, like in Omelas, he also walks away from it all. But there is an enormous difference: in Omelas the walkers simply step away from the system and all accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More to it, essentially allowing the injustice to continue but disavowing responsibility. For Jonas, the act of walking away from his Giver responsibilities means that all those memories of pain and injustice are placed back on the society that created them; it forces a privileged and apathetic populace to face its past and to choose again. It’s not an abandonment of the injustice; it’s a return to reconciliation of justice.

We can say that The Community of The Giver has attempted to build an entire society of avoidance, of blinding themselves to the horror they wreak, even while they inject the needle of release into the next grandmother in line. It’s probably a lot easier than policing their ideologies like Jemisin suggests, but it is no less terrifying. I’ve argued that the 2006 film Idiocracy is too absurd to be anything but documentary.

I should say, it hasn’t been fewer than a few hundred times across my classroom years that one or a dozen students has not suggested that I “think too much” and that “ignorance is bliss” in their efforts to shift topics away from our classroom literature. I get it. Facing the pain and trouble in our history (and in our present) is never comfortable, but at the same time, as I’ve asked them, is comfort our highest virtue? Our ultimate goal? If so, we might just as well wire our brains for unending pleasure or float ourselves forever in saltwater sensory deprivation tanks. Finding comfort? Finding bliss? That’s actually pretty easy. Finding these along with virtue gets quite a bit tougher. So long as we live in community and language together, accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More is part of that virtue. Are we moving towards cultures of unquestioning comfort or towards those of reconciliation? 

 

At Stake: The Sanitation of Memory

I grew up in a small suburban town in the US through the 1960s and 1970s. Detroit was out there, but a scary place that people didn’t travel to. Quite a myth of fear, that. But like my education of periodic tables and badminton, reading Madame Bovary and Robert Frost, I can’t pretend I met a lot of content that inspired critical inquiry. If I had any excuse at all as I moved slowly from high school to a local community college and then (finally) to a broader education, it’s that access to education, information, and experience required a bit more work than it does in a digitally-available world. But hell, I could have been more devoted to the newspapers, and my neighbor, otherwise an amazing guy and mentor, spent his afternoons watching C-SPAN and reading the New York Times. Who wanted to do that? 

So I don’t shirk my slow accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More to all the Hideous Bargains we’ve made in part in my name. But I am absolutely curious about the structural or systemic approaches we’ve made to slow me and others down to realizing it. 

And as a way of introducing an approach to talking about the Evasion strategy we’ve seen here with Lowry, I want to introduce two writers and thinkers who I’ve been reading these past couple of years. Each of them through slightly different methods describes this shifty washing of memory and accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More, of our attempted evasions of choice, and of our realization and acceptance of our roles in suffering and hideous bargains.

To understand where I’m coming from here, let’s start with Lowry, because while we don’t have any kind of ability to do what her fantasy novel does in literally taking away memory and placing it in the hands of a single Giver, that doesn’t mean other efforts to accomplish the same thing aren’t in operation. Let’s try her approach this way: The end goal of The Community is to create an emotional numbness, promote conformity, and dull true joy while crippling wise choices; to create a docile sameness of contentment. To accomplish this, The Community works with a central Council to erase narratives which make us uncomfortable. If history or present news makes us unhappy or distressed, we just remove it, rewrite it. Let me scratch my head to see if I’ve noticed anything like that going on anywhere. Why, yes, it seems at some level that our entire history and national narratives are hotly contested (I can’t say debated, which I would favor).

Okay. That’s Lowry. But close on the heels of this is a kind of cultural or social self-deception about this history. This is the behavior Rabih Alameddine pursues in his essay (also a book) called Comforting Myths from 2024. His argument is that when we tell ourselves myths and histories about our own tolerance, kindness, and moral superiority, we are deliberately creating comforting falsehoods to avoid reckoning with trauma and brutality. Every story and news article we read must find a figure with whom we identify who stands nobly and works to build solutions which solve injustices neatly. The publishing world offers us these stories ceaselessly (and we offer them in schools), and we never encounter writers who have stories of real horror in the world because these are simply . . . unpalatable. The result is a crippling of our work for healing because the real and complex and ongoing causes of the damage are hidden behind pleasant stories. The stories we might truly need, Alameddine says, are out there for us, but they’re not within easy and proffered reach. All the easier, happier, beach reads are shoved at us. And not just beach reads and romantacies, either. A whole lot of award-winning international writers are in this pile of comforters, he says, himself included. They are awarded in part for this very ability to comfort rather than confront. Finding the others means getting past what is pushed so frequently in our faces.

Like my teen and early 20s self, we have to work harder to find the truth that lies beyond the stories we’re told.

But beyond this, too, is a third issue, a kind of rhetorical revisionism, one described by Omar El Akkad in his 2025 book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Akkad’s argument is that The West, in particular, is fond of ret-conning its own history, re-framing stories to absolve the privileged of moral failures and to make victims into criminals. This is a violent kind of revisionism, but it proceeds on the logical extension of what we’ve been talking about all episode: whoever controls the story, controls the behavior of those who read it. You want to find your way to learn about and acknowledge injustice? Akkad says that this will happen only after. After it is safe for everyone to be far away from the possibility of punishment. I don’t need to say too much about this except that hypocrisy is kind of a staple of our human experience. What’s different here, Akkad says, is that this behavior is becoming a normalized practice. That child in the closet suffering over there? He’s never been able to appreciate the good life, anyway. And he deserves it, too, because he committed that one crime–you know, one of them–it’s always that way with them.

But when we read the world earnestly, thoughtfully, we become witnesses with choices. Jonas may have been an involuntary witness (the role of Giver assigned to him), but his assigned role was to keep the truth of memories hidden; and he shared them. But all of us, as Alameddine and Akkad tell us, can be cultural and moral witnesses, too, voluntarily, willfully. It’s a little odd (or maybe not) to frame our ability to forget, to ignore, to dull ourselves, to future deferment, to apathy, as all pieces of privilege. But a society which permits or relies upon suffering and injustice while affording us these means of escaping our accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More? I don’t know another way to describe it. The luxury of denial is our ability to know the Suffering Child sacrifice exists and consciously choose to ignore or suppress it. But even then? What is most frightening to me: that we might lose our capacity, our ability, to correct course.

There are those in Omelas who walk away; and so does Lowry’s Jonas, though his act destroys The Community’s collective lie. Alameddine and Akkad stay and, reading them, tell us we must abandon our comforts and future promises, that we must confront the world and our role in it, however unwittingly, now.  A community built on the deliberate denial of truth or the systematic neglect of suffering is morally and humanly bankrupt. The luxury of denial or ignorance is always paid for by someone else’s pain.

 

Where To?

Okay, so who knew that little YA novel was going to get so heavy? Like I said, though, a lot of what we’re wrestling with becomes so challenging because we’ve already been in the thick of this for a while. We can’t help but connect what we’ve been doing to this new novel, whether it asked us to or not! And we’re at places that Achebe asked us about: whether we are writing and reading for or against the Emperor. Yes, I consider reading and writing to both be acts of meaning-making, which means we are selecting and building narratives for ourselves. As witnesses (presuming we actively look to arrive at truths to witness), we might look to readings which re-educate, even regenerate ourselves and then others. As I said with my own work addressing the indigenous Land Acknowledgement, I must understand as much as I can of the truth before I might ever hope for a healthy approach to allyship and reconciliation. But what we cannot expect of our literature is to rest comfortably in a kind of unearned innocence. 

Put simply: There are comfort literatures out there, and I understand their function and need. But to immerse ourselves utterly in them, obliviously, is a very different and dangerous act altogether. There is power in literatures of discomfort, in discomforting narratives, those which challenge us first to see, then to act. Great Societies are not built upon illusions or apathy. 

And so let’s move forward with that in mind. If you’ve been listening to more than one or two of my episodes so far, I suspect you’re with me on that. Let’s presume that, at the least, we collectively reject delusion, deferment, and rationalization. 

And this returns us to some of our original questions. We know the Suffering Child is there; we know we are in some relationship with it, even dependent upon it in some way; and yet we still must act. And for Le Guin and others, we still do not. The “strenuous mood” is not as fit as we might imagine. 

What then? 

Let’s read some more together. As we make this final long leg of our journey forward, let’s remember that our reading is not just our quiet search for answers but an active rejection of silence that we share with the writers we meet. 

And so next episode, we’ll pause to consider that voice, that non-silence, and write about it. And then we’ll take a few uncertain steps forward as witnesses.

Oh, and the Winter Solstice is just ahead. It’s a great time for a ghost story, in the Victorian tradition. Go read one. And tell me about it.

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

Adams, Victoria. Why Ban the Giver, by Lois Lowry (1993)? – Victoria’s Reading Alcove. 18 June 2023, https://victoriasreadingalcove.com/my-bookshelf/why-ban-the-giver-by-lois-lowry-1993/.

Alameddine, Rabih. Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art. University of Virginia Press, 2024.

Anders, Charlie Jane. “Ursula K. Le Guin, Fyodor Dovstoevsky, and the Snuggly Comfort of Evil.” Gizmodo, 24 July 2015, https://gizmodo.com/ursula-k-le-guin-fyodor-dovstoevsky-and-the-comfort-1719605127.

Cooper, Kody W. Wisdom and Warnings from “The Giver” Ten Years On. Word on Fire.  12 July 2024, https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/wisdom-and-warnings-from-the-giver-ten-years-on/.

Hendershot, Judy, et al. “An Interview with Lois Lowry, 1994 Newbery Medal Winner.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 48, no. 4, 1994, pp. 308–09. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20201427. 

El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. 1st ed, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025.

Lemov, Doug. “Re-Post: A Teacher’s Review of The Giver, Teach Like a Champion.” Teach Like a Champion, 22 Aug. 2014, https://teachlikeachampion.org/blog/re-post-teachers-review-giver/.

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2015.

Tao, Aaron. “The Giver’s Dystopia: Total Equality and No Humanity.” The Beacon, Independent Institute , 18 Sept. 2014, blog.independent.org/2014/09/18/t he-givers- dystopia-total-equality-and-no-humanity/.