The Giver
“If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.”
– Lois Lowry
The Giver’s ending is iconic. It is a classic that a lot of people read in 6th, perhaps 7th grade, and one of the questions that your teacher likely asked you is whether you thought that Jonas survived his escape from the community. Was his final ride down the snowy hill into a warm village filled with music real, or a vision which arose from his freezing brain succumbing to the elements. This ambiguity was unfortunately dispelled by the existence of a sequel with Jonas in it, but for this discussion I will focus on only The Giver in isolation. It is in my opinion that it thematically makes sense for Jonas to have died at the end of the book.
Jonas’ journey into the wilderness includes a major characteristic which is relevant for this discussion: hunger. This real, material hunger stands in comparison to the hunger described in this article’s quote – that being a metaphorical hunger for the memory of “feelings, for color, for love.” I would even say that the physical hunger is a representation of the emotional hunger that he feels at this moment. All the memories of his time as the receiver are being stripped of him as he ventures farther and farther away from the community, and he simultaneously has less and less food, thus becoming even more physically starved.
What he is doing parallels the action of The Giver onto Jonas throughout the book – except that this time, it’s all ending with a bang. The people of the community are, at least in a metaphorical sense, “starving.” They have no memory, no color, no feelings. They are in a way “dead” from this hunger. In his final actions, paralleling The Giver’s role, he transfers the memories of his year of being a receiver to the people of the community, so that they won’t be stuck forever dead, forever starving. The thing is, that as a result of this, Jonas will no longer have the memories. He will have husks of them – remnants of once they once were, as evidenced by The Giver’s conversation about memories earlier in the book. Thus, he will once again be starving. Considering that the result of starvation is death, it makes sense that the obvious conclusion to Jonas’ story would be his heroic death.
One might ask: “How do you explain the sled and the lights and the village? If they aren’t real, then he shouldn’t be able to remember them and form a hallucination of them” Well, here I argue that it is simply the husks of memories resurfacing. Earlier in the book, The Giver explained that “[He] will. I am left with a vague wisp of that one.” There is still something left of memories after transfer, and the remnants might just be being brought back up subconsciously. It could also be that the memories simply aren’t gone yet. There isn’t a concrete memory loss range defined anywhere in the book, so he might simply be holding onto one of his earliest memories and that of love and holidays. Him hearing music also doesn’t really make sense. Earlier in the book, the giver describes his extra sense awakening as “It was different. For me, it was hearing-beyond,” in reference specifically to hearing music. He also says that “[He’ll] give you some before I go,” implying that Jonas has never heard music or had a memory of it shared with him by The Giver, and that some sort of sensory field blocked it, as with color. Jonas would have never been able to recognize music at the end of the book, which I believe implies that his brain just made up what it thought music was. Everything about the ending can be explained as a hallucination, and as such, Jonas died.