The Giver Ending Essay
Study Questions
1. The ending of the giver has been interpreted in a few different ways. Choose one possible interpretation of the ending and argue its validity, using clues from the text to explain your conclusions.
Answer for Study Question 1 >>
The two major interpretations of The Giver’s ending are that (1) Jonas and Gabriel have truly escaped the physical boundaries of their society and discovered a real village in Elsewhere, and (2) Jonas’s vision of the village is only a hallucination that he experiences as he and Gabriel freeze to death in the snow in the middle of nowhere. Both arguments can be solidly supported by references in the text.
In order to argue that the two children freeze to death in the snow and that their vision of the village is only an illusion, we can rely on the uncanny similarity between the landscape Jonas sees—or thinks he sees—and the memories the Giver has transmitted to him in the past. It is extremely unlikely that Jonas would come upon a hill that looks …show more content…
Not only is the moment significant as the first time we see Jonas experience something totally new, but it presents an interesting challenge to both the reader and the writer: at this early point in the story, Jonas has not yet begun his training, and so he does not expect unusual things to happen to him. When the apple changes, Lowry must communicate the quality of its change without using any vocabulary or ideas that Jonas would not already know. She cannot tell us directly that there is no color in Jonas’s world, since the entire story is told from Jonas’s perspective: he does not know what color is, so he does not know that color exists. Lowry has to show us somehow that something is missing from Jonas’s world, so that we recognize the “change” that Jonas witnesses as the restoration of the missing
1. The ending of the giver has been interpreted in a few different ways. Choose one possible interpretation of the ending and argue its validity, using clues from the text to explain your conclusions.
Answer for Study Question 1 >>
The two major interpretations of The Giver’s ending are that (1) Jonas and Gabriel have truly escaped the physical boundaries of their society and discovered a real village in Elsewhere, and (2) Jonas’s vision of the village is only a hallucination that he experiences as he and Gabriel freeze to death in the snow in the middle of nowhere. Both arguments can be solidly supported by references in the text.
In order to argue that the two children freeze to death in the snow and that their vision of the village is only an illusion, we can rely on the uncanny similarity between the landscape Jonas sees—or thinks he sees—and the memories the Giver has transmitted to him in the past. It is extremely unlikely that Jonas would come upon a hill that looks …show more content…
Not only is the moment significant as the first time we see Jonas experience something totally new, but it presents an interesting challenge to both the reader and the writer: at this early point in the story, Jonas has not yet begun his training, and so he does not expect unusual things to happen to him. When the apple changes, Lowry must communicate the quality of its change without using any vocabulary or ideas that Jonas would not already know. She cannot tell us directly that there is no color in Jonas’s world, since the entire story is told from Jonas’s perspective: he does not know what color is, so he does not know that color exists. Lowry has to show us somehow that something is missing from Jonas’s world, so that we recognize the “change” that Jonas witnesses as the restoration of the missing