Discussion Topic
Details and Attendees of the Release Ceremony in The Giver
Summary:
The Release Ceremony in The Giver is a solemn and significant event attended by the community members, including the Elders who oversee the proceedings. During the ceremony, individuals who are deemed to no longer fit within the community's structure are released, a euphemism for euthanasia. The ceremony's details are shrouded in secrecy, with the true nature of 'release' revealed only to a select few.
What is the release ceremony like in The Giver?
A reader should check in chapter 4 for solid textual evidence regarding this question. During this chapter, Jonas gives a bath to a woman named Larissa. He talks with her during the bath, and she tells him that her community celebrated the release of an older person that day. Jonas then asks for some details about what the release ceremony is like. Readers who have attended a funeral are likely to see parallels between the release ceremony and a funeral—the main difference is that the person slated to be released is still alive, at least for the moment.
Larissa explains that each release ceremony has a "telling." During the telling, someone stands up and narrates various important events in the life of the person who is to be released. Other people are allowed to get up and speak, and they also tell what they remember about the person. The person...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
being released is also allowed to speak, and it is essentially a goodbye speech.
Well there was the telling of his life…is always first. Then the toast. We all raised our glasses and cheered. We chanted the anthem. He made a lovely good-bye speech. And several of us made little speeches wishing him well.
After the speeches are concluded, the person to be released is taken away to another room where the actual releasing occurs. Nobody gets to see that part except the release committee; this is why everybody believes that being released is a wonderful thing, not an instance of murder or euthanasia.
Who attends the release ceremony in The Giver?
Jonas, the young protagonist of Lois Lowry's novel, The Giver, has always been told that Ceremonies of Release are happy celebrations. Thus, in Chapter 19, when he actually has an opportunity to witness a release ceremony, he is surprised that the ceremony (for the release of an unwanted twin child, who is being disposed of because he is the smaller of two twins) is held in a "small, windowless room, empty except for a bed, a table with some equipment on it . . . and a cupboard."
The ceremony itself is not "celebratory" at all. It is attended only by Jonas's father, who kills the infant by fatal injection and then disposes of the body by putting it in a carton and putting the carton down a garbage chute. This is the moment in the novel at which Jonas realizes the full horror of the system he is living in and the lies he has been told about the ceremony of release. This is the event that prompts Jonas to leave and to take baby Gabriel with him.