The Giver Plot

Plot of The Giver

The main character, Jonas, is part of a society with enforced sameness. This is achieved by removing every memory of a time before the sameness begun. Jonas is assigned as the new receiver of memory when he becomes a twelve, and the previous receiver, now the Giver, transmits the memories to Jonas. As his training goes on Jonas wants to make a difference, he wants everyone to see color and feel love like he does, which was the Giver’s intention. With his help Jonas escapes the community with his “brother”, Gabe, in attempt to release the memories to everyone else, while the Giver stays back to help everyone adjust. In the end Jonas dies from hypothermia and we are left with the suspense of what happened to the community.

In the book there is textual evidence that the Giver was released and both Gabe and Jonas die at the end. But in the movie, nobody seems to have died because there is little stable evidence stating that. We can safely say that Jonas dies at the end of the book because when he talks about his condition, he mentions many symptoms of hypothermia, such as hallucinations and severe pain in his feet. There is no possible way he could have made it after that, so he is obviously dead, and if he’s dead, so is Gabe because since he’s just a baby he would’ve died way before Jonas. Plus, in the last paragraph Jonas says he hears music, the Giver never gave him the memory of music so he must’ve been released before Jonas died to allow him to have that memory. The Giver was released because the elders would have figured out his plan by then, so they released him. However, in the movie the ending is very unclear. Before then the Giver had already showed Jonas music, so we can’t use Jonas hearing the music coming from the cabin as evidence of the Giver’s release. As for Jonas and Gabe know they died because we saw the memories returned and color restored so they must’ve died, although I’m not exactly sure how, it was most likely hypothermia just like in the