Bonus Mini-Review: The Giver

The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is read by tens of thousands of middle schoolers each year. It is by no means obscure, and thanks to it being on the reading list of many an English classes, there has probably been more words written about The Giver than there are plankton in the sea. What I want to focus on is the language of The Giver.

In The Giver, humanity has solved all the problems. All of them. But not without a heavy cost. A perfect tranquil existence has been obtained only by draining people of their history, of their passions, and of their freedom. The whole world has been reshaped to reflect this uniform, sterile society. This is not to say everyone is an identical zombie. People superficially feel emotions and they have all sorts of different jobs based on their personalities.

The book is written by a young teen, Jonah, who is a regular member of this utopia. The way he thinks, the conversations he has, all reflect the pleasant flatness of his community. Usually, flat dialogue is something to be avoided, but in The Giver the text is chilling. People talk like a careful ten year old laid out each of their words . Even the wisest person on the planet, the man burdened with the collective history of mankind, talks in the same polite complete sentences. And not by accident. Precision in language is drilled into all members of the community at an early age. More than any exposition in the book, the way the story is written gives us the most detail about the setting.

In a way, the language of The Giver is similar to Newspeak in 1984. Newspeak is a recent invention in 1984 created as a sort of linguistic thought control. It is a dumbing down of language so that eventually people will no longer be able to express complex ideas. Newspeak is in it's infancy in 1984 and not very effective- after all the main characters seem to have no trouble expressing philosophical principles. The Giver gives us view into a world that has been using Newspeak forever. In The Giver no one needs ever have a conversation about vague topics such as politics or ethics. Their language is one of perfect clarity where wishy-washy concepts are difficult to express. Because everyone is taught to use unambiguous language they end up thinking unambiguous, uncomplicated thoughts.

Love is impossible to precisely define. So love does not exist in the world of The Giver.