The Giver and Neurodivergence

This entry might be confusing if you haven’t read Lois Lowry’ The Giver series. I’ll do my best to explain, but it all makes much more sense if you know the context.

The protagonists of the Giver series, as is my latest revelation, embody what it’s like living as a neurodivergent in a neurotypical society. Now I have no clue if this was in any way intentional or if it’s just accidental, but the point remains.

The Giver was what made me realize this, or more specifically Jonas’ community, as Claire from The Son is also part of that same community. It’s the two of them that embody two of the biggest things that being neurodivergent holds. Those being, being perceived as rude and not being satisfied participating in small talk. Jonas is the first and Claire is the second.

Now, before I go any further, I’d like to say that I am going to speak in generalization. I understand that not every neurotypical or neurodivergent is the same, but stereotypes and such exist for a reason. So if you’re the type of person who sees a demographic you belong to being talked about as a collective and your response to whatever is being said is “But not all of us are like this!”, you might wanna stop reading.

So back to Jonas’ community. In The Giver, we get explained that in this community, there are rules against rudeness. People don’t talk about their differences, ‘cause it could lead to conflict. If someone expresses being offended in some way or that the other has crossed a line the rules against rudeness forbids them to cross, the offending party must say a specific line of apology that the offended must accept. It doesn’t matter if the offending side actually thinks they did something wrong or if they’re actually sorry, they HAVE to apologize. In the exact same way, it doesn’t matter if the offended party feels satisfied by the mandatory apology, they MUST verbally accept it. The exception from this is the book’s main protagonist, Jonas, who is selected to be the Reciever of Memory in the community. Among his instructions that tell him about the training he has to complete to become the Reciever, he is told that the rules of rudeness don’t apply to him anymore and that he can ask any question from anyone and expect an answer. This also communicates to the audience that the rules of rudeness also apply to asking questions. One can only assume that a child in that community asking why someone is in a wheelchair, would be seen as the biggest offense ever. Jonas being exempt from this rule allows him essentially to ask whatever he wants and say whatever he wants. He doesn’t use this often, he still grew up with the rules of rudeness drilled into his head, but as time goes on, he gains a different perspective on these rules. He can now ask any question but realizes that he can never trust the answer because the adults who give them could be lying. Him trying to communicate an important message becomes more important to him than his mandatory apology for disturbing a game that in his opinion is really disturbing and the other kids really shouldn’t be playing. And he is perceived as rude for this. In the mentioned game, he is trying to communicate with his friends about why their game is problematic but all the friends care about is the disturbed game, it being an offense, and Jonas not saying his mandatory apology. Which is a classic ND experience. Neurodivergent folk mean what they say and say what they mean. This causes communication issues, but it also causes us to be perceived as rude, as we often will communicate our thoughts and feelings in a way neurotypicals deem inappropriate. NTs often walk on eggshells around everyone. They will often swallow thoughts and not speak up about injustices either, in the name of not being perceived as rude. Now there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, but often when neurodivergent folk are called rude, it isn’t because they were actually being rude, but because they were communicating a truth someone wasn’t comfortable hearing. They call out an unfairness or flaw in a system or point out that someone is blatantly being an asshole and everyone else is letting them. Just like Jonas, often when NDs are called rude it is merely that they were communicating something neurotypicals weren’t ready or able to hear. (Neurodivergent folk being actually rude is of course a thing, I’m not saying it isn’t. It is merely not as common as NTs’ accusations.)

The other big one with Claire is small talk. Oh, the arguments I got into over this! But the fact remains that small talk is a part of neurotypical society that neurodivergent folk cannot engage in and this gets us a lot of flak. In The Son, Claire embodies that particular experience, and a bit more, by not taking the pills. Now, in this series, in Jonas’s community, at about twelve years old, everyone starts taking pills. These pills take away people’s emotions and they are left with what are surface-level feelings. These feelings are dull and fleeting. The only ones not taking it are The Giver, training Jonas to be the next Reciever, Jonas himself, and as we learn in The Son, birthmothers. It is implied that the girls selected as birthmothers don’t take the pills while carrying because it interferes with the process. But, once they stop carrying, they go back to taking the pills. All except Claire, who fails as a birthmother and is reassigned and through a mistake, she never gets pills to take, as she was not yet taking them when she was selected as a birthmother and as a birthmother, she was forbidden to take them. No one checked if Claire had the pills, so she remained without them. Which no one seemed to notice, not even Claire for a pretty long time. But eventually, she starts noticing that she is thinking thoughts and feeling things that nobody else around her seems to. Among other things, she notices how conversations around her are always about meaningless things. Basically everything in the community is 24/7 small talk. Claire can’t find herself to engage in these conversations, and when she does, she has to put effort into doing so. This is because she finds that these meaningless conversations aren’t enough for her. Why on Earth would one spend her time talking about the fish hatchery when she has a son out there that she longs to see, or they could be discussing the strange people that work on the delivery boat and where those people are from and what things are the norm there. Basically, Claire is yearning for conversations that are much deeper than her almost-unfeeling coworkers can provide. Which is an everyday neurodivergent experience.

Now I’m not saying that neurotypical folk are unfeeling or that they don’t want deep conversations. It is merely that while they believe that you have to spend God-knows-how-long yapping about insignificant matters to “break the ice” before talking about more meaningful stuff, neurodivergent folk can, want to, and will dive into the deepest of depth in their first conversation with someone. Which is often deemed wrong by neurotypicals, which I don’t get. Like I said at the beginning, neurodivergent folk are unsatisfied with small talk. We experience the world deeply and want to talk about and further explore that depth. We don’t see why you would have a conversation about the weather when you could be discussing the ramifications of gender stereotypes being drilled into our brains since childhood and how they restrict our way of thinking. And unlike NTs keep shouting, you do not need to have had weeks of shallow conversations with someone to talk about deep or heavy topics.

This also comes up with Jonas. As the Receiver of Memory, he and Giver have access to endless memories of the past that the rest of the community doesn't. While the community is living in ignorance about actual heavy stuff, like emotion, pain, death, or even light and joyful stuff, like music and colors, Jonas and Giver experience these things. Jonas, therefore, experiences the world in a way that is so much more deep and meaningful than the rest of the community. He doesn't just exist in it, he lives in it. Which is, as mentioned, the case with ND folk. We exist in depth that neurotypicals don't always tread to. While they're not unable to go there, NTs are usually content living in the shallower depth, while NDs are always deeper. And just like when Jonas tried to communicate and show how he sees the world, he was caalled rude, so are Neurodivergent folk judged.

This series also holds other ways in which the protagonists are like ND folk. Returning to Claire and the pills for a minute, I mentioned how the pills take away the community members' emotions. This leaves those who don’t take the pills feeling so much more than everyone else around them. Now while the stereotype, especially with autism, is that ND folk are bad at emotions and empathy, the opposite is actually true. Neurodivergent folk feel everything really deeply and have much bigger reactions to things because of this (Again, I am not saying NTs don’t feel). This isn’t explored as heavily with Jonas, although it is brought up, but The Son actually puts emphasis on the fact that Claire exists on an emotional level so deep, no one around could possibly understand. Similar to ND folk.

Things get less obvious when we branch out to Gathering Blue and The Messenger, but it’s there still. In Gathering Blue, for example, the main character, Kira, and her friends, Thomas and Matt, experience their community (very different from Jonas’) in a way no one else does. Kira and Thomas are artistic-minded, which in this clearly post-apocalyptic world is depicted as an insane rarity. They both have skill in some form of art that already sets them apart from the rest of their community. But they are also physically separated, in their housing, from the community by its leaders. Kira is also physically disabled, which in this community is the equivalent of a death sentence. Matt is less obvious, but he is an outsider in the community, on account of being friends with Kira, a kind and gentle person, which originates from her disability and how she’s treated for it, Matt too is kinder than most people in the community where the number one rule is “the strong survive”. These three are trying to survive in a community where nothing and no one shares their talents or values or way of seeing their world. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this is like neurodivergent people. The world is built for neurotypicals and NDs are literally wired differently. We’re all just trying to survive in a world where it feels like nothing and no one shares our values or way of seeing the world.

Matt, who goes on to be Matty in The Messenger, also embodies neurodivergent masking. Aka, burning insane amounts of mental and often physical energy to pretend to be like neurotypicals because the world would rather have us break ourselves than accept us for who we are. In The Messenger, Matty discovers that he has this magical healing ability (oh yeah, there’s magical powers that the main protagonists possess) and is also from a different community. In between Gathering Blue and The Messenger, Matty moved from his original community to a different one, called Villiage. Now Villiage works by rules way different than the one Matty’s from. As mentioned, in Kira and Matty’s community the strongest survive and no one bats an eye at a runaway child stealing food or someone dying in a fight over pretty much anything. So Matty spent the majority of his childhood learning nothing but how to, as a child, survive in a community so brutal that the very highest of authorities are the only ones safe from the violence. So when Matty arrived in this villiage where none of that existed, where he was taken in and cared for by a kind man, where the leader of Villiage personally knew everyone, a village that was a refuge for people like Matty, he became an outsider. His entire childhood experience changed overnight and now he had to fit into a world that he didn’t really know or understand. He unlearned his brutal survival skills, but he remained an outsider. Obviously, this is trauma, but the connection to having to survive with surroundings you can't understand is still very much a neurodivergent experience. And when he developed his healing ability, his outsider status just grew because now he had some supernatural ability that no one else around him possessed. He did his best to pretend to be exactly like everyone else, in his desire to fit in, but he ultimately couldn’t. Because no matter how hard he tried to hide it, at his core, he was always going to be different. Which is the experience that every neurodivergent goes through. The crushing need to fit in causes us to hide our true selves.

Matty’s brutally learned survival skills are also something neurodivergent folk can relate to, as, like Matty in his original community just trying to survive, we live in a world that is constant pressure and competition, structured for neurotypicals. For neurodivergent folk, it is often a fight to just make it through the day. So we pick up coping skills and survival strategies, that can be damaging or bad and almost always seen as wrong.

Even if these specific things that mirror the neurodivergent experience didn’t exist in these books, the very premise that all four are built on is enough. All four main protagonists live in these communities that they are either secluded from from the beginning or become secluded from at a point in the story. They see everything through a different lens than everyone else which allows them insight into the flaws of their community and the people in it. But said people aren’t able, ready, or willing to hear and/or acknowledge those flaws. So our protagonists are just left to fend for themselves with maybe the one or two people who are also secluded from their community. Just like ND folk.