The Giver- The Importance of Memory

With research i found that the author of The Giver, Lois Lowry, was inspired to write this novel after visiting her aging father, who had lost most of his long-term memory. She saw through him that without memory there is no pain. If someone does not remember physical pain, they might as well have not experienced it. If they had made a choice in their past to make their lives different in a negative way, and they no longer remember doing it, there is no pain inflicted from it any longer. You cannot be plagued by regret or grief without memory.


In the novel The Giver sometime in the past, the community decided to rid all pain from their lives by choosing sameness and discarding all memories to only one holder. All the experiences of a community had been transphered to one person, just so they could be relieved of all the pain that occured through human history. For example, the community had never experienced climate. There is no snow and no sun. Jonas experiences them through memories. This is only a small example though. "And the strongest memory that came was hunger. It came from many generations back. Centuries back. The population had become so big that hunger was everywhere. Excruciating hunger and starvation. It was followed by warfare." (pg. 111) This quote explains that without memory we do not know how to make choices that affect our future. Here, the Giver used this memory of starvation and hunger to decide whether or not families should be given a third child. He decided that they shouldn't because of over-population. "From the distance, Jonas could hear the thud of cannons. Overwhelmed by pain, he lay there in the fearsomne stench for hours, listened to the men and animals die, and learned what warfare meant." (pg. 120) This is what the Giver knew would happen if the community became over-populated.

This is why people learn about history in school. We must understand what the outcomes and consequences of certain decisions are. For example, in history we learn about the world wars. We learn about how countries allowed Hitler to do certain bad things because they didn't want to get involved, but while they did this, as "innocent" bystanders, they allowed something much worse to occur, WWII. Now this could relate to something on a much smaller scale, such as a school fight. Lets say a bunch of kids, "innocent" bystanders, just stand around and watch the fight. Well, that doesn't stop one of the kids in the fight from getting very badly injured. So because there are many factors that happened a long time ago, or as refered to as " back and back and back." in The Giver, memories can be very very important for decision making and not repeating the ugly truths of our past.