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Why does the apple change when Jonas plays catch with it? Why must Jonas take pills? Where does Jonas volunteer? What does the word “release” mean in the context of the community? Why does the community in The Giver favor “Sameness”?
How do Jonas's characteristics change in The Giver? Jonas changes from an automatically obedient child to a wise, mature young man throughout the book.
When he discovers beauty, pain, love and death under the tutelage of The Giver, he becomes frustrated with the community's ignorance and convinces The Giver to help him change it. In order to become truly wise, Jonas must learn completely selfless love for Gabriel and his community and be willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of another's.
The Giver tells Jonas that he himself is too weak to make the journey anyway. He cannot even see colors anymore. Jonas asks the Giver about his early experiences with seeing beyond, how they were different from Jonas’s own, and the Giver tells him that he heard beyond.
As Jonas and the Giver plot Jonas’s escape, Jonas’s growing bitterness towards his society surprises even himself, and he learns the difficulty of compassion. He’s recently found out the Elders secretly put people to death, and as such, readers understand his desire to turn his back on them.
We know how Jonas changes because Lowry narrates The Giver in the third person, limited omniscient viewpoint in order to reveal Jonas' thoughts and feelings. When the novel begins, Jonas is as unconcerned as anyone else about how he is living.
It’s not until the Giver comes into the narrative and starts relaying memories to Jonas that the style changes at all. The memories are moving, mysterious, and strange. This changes the way that Lowry writes and the images she creates.
