Describe the current Receiver of Memories.

The Giver is fair-eyed, like Jonas, and like the previous Receiver, a girl called Rosemary. The Giver claims Rosemary as his daughter.

In her Newbery acceptance speech, Lowry talked about a painter she had met in 1979, while working on an article in a magazine. Something fascinated Lowry about the painter's face, especially his eyes. "Later I hear that he has become blind. I think about him-his name is Carl Nelson-from time to time. His photograph hangs over my desk. I wonder what it was like for him to lose the colors about which he was so impassioned. I wish, in a whimsical way, that he could have somehow magically given me the capacity to see the way he did." (Lowry's photograph of Carl Nelson was used on the front cover of the first American edition of the novel.)

The Giver, who describes himself as not as old as he looks, provides Just such a magical transfer of powers. He has been made tired by the burden of knowledge and memories, the assimilation and storage of which have consumed his life. As soon as Jonas meets him (in Chapter 10), The Giver is at pains to point out that it is not the memory of nostalgia-not the recollections of childhood normally indulged in by the old-that he must transmit. "It's the memories of the whole world."

His apartment is book-lined, at first giving the impression that The Giver's knowledge is professorial, and that the relationship between him and Jonas will be one of sage and student. But this impression is quickly undermined when The Giver announces that he is going to transmit the memory of snow. This involves a ritualistic laying on of hands and an extra-sensory simulation of the sensation of cold.

After similar transmissions, both pleasurable and painful, The Giver concludes his education of Jonas in a very different fashion. He shows him a videotape recording of a "Release," and then, clearly having become opposed to the community himself, helps Jonas plan an escape.