The Giver

The audience at the Ceremony of Twelve is also deeply troubled when the Chief Elder skips Jonas. After all of the anticipation, excitement, and pride leading up to the ceremony, Jonas now feels terror and humiliation. The Chief Elder senses the anxiety in the room and apologizes for causing it. She also apologizes specifically to Jonas, an unusual choice in a community so averse to recognizing differences. She says he hasn’t been assigned a job; instead, he has been “selected” (60)for an extremely special role: Receiver of Memory. The community only has one Receiver, so this selection is extraordinarily rare. The outgoing Receiver must train the incoming one. The current Receiver is one of the community’s elders, “a man Jonas had never noticed before, a bearded man with pale eyes” (61).

The Chief Elder notes that the Committee of Elders failed the last time they chose a Receiver. Jonas doesn’t know what she’s talking about but notices that the crowd is uneasy when she mentions this: “We could not afford another failure. […] I will not dwell on the experience because it causes us all terrible discomfort” (61). She goes on to explain that Receiver is the “most honored” job in the community and that Jonas must be “alone, apart, while he is prepared by the current Receiver for the job” (61). This makes Jonas feel uneasy. He can’t make sense of what this job selection means and wonders if he should insist there’s been a mistake: “He did not know what he was to become. Or what would become of him” (64).

The Chief Elder says that Jonas’s "intelligence,""integrity," and "courage" (62) made him a prime candidate for this position. She tells Jonas that the training involves physical pain, something he has never truly experienced. She says he’ll experience “pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience” (63). Even the Receiver is unable to describe it. She says the community cannot prepare him for this pain. Jonas does not feel courageous when he hears this news. The Chief Elder says Jonas will also develop "wisdom," an attribute essential to the Receiver role, and that he possesses another quality unique to Receivers: “the Capacity to See Beyond” (63). When she says this, he recalls the unusual incident where the apple turned into something else. At this moment, he starts to believe he is supposed to be the Receiver. The crowd chants his name, softly at first, and then louder and faster. This chant fills Jonas with pride and tells him that the community accepts him as the new Receiver.

For the first time, Jonas feels set apart from the rest of the community. Jonas’s parents tell him that they’re very proud. Jonas wants to know how the Committee of Elders failed in selecting a Receiver a decade earlier. His parents say that they don’t know what became of her, and that they never saw her again after she was selected. Her name must never be spoken in the community, a type of shunning that indicates “the highest degree of disgrace” (67). They emphasize that the position is a great honor.

In his room, Jonas opens his training folder to see what he’ll be learning from the current Receiver. Most of the other Twelves’ folders have many more materials in them; Jonas’s has just one sheet of paper. It tells him he no longer needs to follow the community’s rules about "rudeness," he “may ask any question of any citizen,” and “[he] will receive answers” (68). Jonas also learns that he can’t discuss his training with other community members, not even his parents or elders other than the Receiver. He needs to go to his training at the Annex after school each day and report back to his dwelling immediately afterward. Jonas can’t talk about his dreams anymore, and he may not apply for release. He must also refuse medication unless it is unrelated to his Receiver duties. Finally, Jonas is allowed to lie.

Jonas is startled by some of these new rules, especially the ones about rudeness and lying. He can’t remember being tempted to lie before, and he wonders if others had been given permission to lie in their job instructions. Jonas could ask them if they were lying, “[b]ut he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received were true” (71). Jonas also worries about the medication prohibition, especially considering the pain the Chief Elder warned him about. He recalls a time he crushed his finger in a door and recalls how medication made the pain go away. He tries to imagine what the pain in his future will feel like without medication, but “it was beyond his comprehension” (70). He doesn’t feel much of anything about being prohibited from applying for release, as doing this has never occurred to him before.