Figurative Language In The Giver

Figurative Language In The Giver: A Field Guide

I've been teaching The Giver to high school juniors for about eight years now. Every year I make the same mistake on the first unit test. I put a question asking students to identify a simile from chapter three. I think they'll pick the one about "like a dog" because it's the most obvious one on the page. Instead, half the class picks the metaphor about color bleeding into the world, which is way more interesting but technically not what the question asked for. That's the thing about figurative language in The Giver - it does a lot of work here, and it doesn't always announce itself with quotation marks.

Lois Lowry's novel runs on two levels of figurative meaning, and understanding the difference between them will change how you read the whole book. The community uses figurative language as a tool of control, while Jonas discovers figurative language as a tool of truth. That contrast isn't accidental, and it's not something you pick up in a first reading. The standard approach to teaching figurative language in novels is to have students highlight similes and metaphors, then explain what they mean. This works fine for most books. The Giver actively fights this method. Lowry deliberately strips her prose of figurative decoration in the early chapters. The first sixty pages read almost clinically - short sentences, literal descriptions, emotional flatness. If you're looking for rich metaphors on page four, you won't find any. And that absence is itself the point. I encountered this problem with a student who kept insisting the opening paragraph was "full of literary devices." I asked her to point to a single metaphor. She squinted at the text for two minutes and said "the Sameness?" I told her Sameness isn't figurative language, it's a neologism that functions as worldbuilding. She then found a simile about "like being a shadow" a few pages later and declared victory. I graded her participation points anyway because she was trying, even if her reading was technically wrong.

The workaround I use now is to teach students to look for figurative language by what it's missing, not by what it's there. The community has no metaphors because metaphors require seeing beyond the literal. When Lowry finally allows figurative language to appear in Jonas's narration, it signals that his perception is expanding. That's a subtler question than "find three simles and underline them."

Simile As Symptom, Not Decoration

The most famous simile in The Giver comes early and it's deceptively simple. Jonas describes the feeling of standing in line for ceremonies as "like waiting to get on the bus." Students usually skip over this because buses exist in their world. But the simile does something specific here. It connects Jonas's experience to something ordinary and communal. There's no poetry in the comparison, and that's intentional. The community has flattened experience into transit metaphors because transit is predictable and safe. Later, when Jonas receives memories, the similes change completely. He describes snow as "like thousands of tiny stars" and feelings of warmth that have no equivalent in his world. These comparisons are sensory-rich because the memories are. The shift in figurative language mirrors the shift in Jonas's consciousness. You can track his awakening by measuring the complexity of his similes, page by page. Here's where I usually lose people: the color simile. Jonas sees red in Rosemary's memory, and he describes it using language that has no precedent in the narrative. Before that moment, Lowry never uses color metaphors because the community has eradicated them. The sudden appearance of figurative color language is Lowry's way of showing Jonas perceiving something his world has deleted. This is the book's central mechanism - figurative language represents forbidden perception.

Metaphor And The Architecture Of Control

The community in The Giver maintains itself through linguistic control, and metaphor is a primary target. "Release" is the word they use for euthanasia. "Unleavened bread" replaces actual bread in ceremonial language. "Elsewhere" replaces death in casual conversation. These aren't just euphemisms, they're metaphors that reframe reality. When Asher stammers and says "I want to go to the concert," he's unconsciously using metaphorical language that reveals his desire for something beyond the scheduled. Jonas's father uses ceremonial language as a kind of anti-metaphor. He reads instructions without interpreting them. His profession depends on literal compliance. When he participates in the release of the newchild, he does it with the same procedural language he uses for everything else. The horror of that scene comes from the gap between what the action is and what the language claims it is. Lowry makes us feel the moral injury without ever using emotional adjectives. I've had students argue that the community's language is "just efficient." It is, and that's exactly why it's dangerous. The efficiency of the language eliminates the possibility of metaphorical thinking, which eliminates the possibility of questioning reality. When you can't say "this is wrong" because your language has no metaphor for wrongness, you can't imagine a different world. That's the mechanism Lowry is exposing, and it's far more sophisticated than a simple metaphor hunt.

Symbolism That Works Against Easy Interpretation

The sled is the most discussed symbol in The Giver, and it's also the most misused one. Teachers love the sled because it represents Jonas's journey back to memory, or forward to danger, or backward to his childhood, depending on which chapter you're in. I tell my students the sled is any symbol they want it to be until chapter twenty-two, where it becomes literal again. Jonas sleds down the hill physically, and the language stops being figurative because he's about to die. The return to literal description is Lowry's way of showing that Jonas has reached the point where symbolism can no longer protect him. The river is another symbol that refuses simple interpretation. It appears in Jonas's memories as both life and death. It carries the sledding party toward safety, but it also separates Jonas from the community. When he finally crosses it, the language becomes almost biblical - "He walked into the water" - and then immediately domestic again. He hears music, he sees light, he thinks about Gabriel. Lowry refuses to let the river stay symbolic. It keeps collapsing into literal reality, and that collapse is the point. Symbols only work when you forget they're symbols. Color symbolism is tricky because Lowry barely uses it. The community has no color, so color in the narrative is always exceptional. When Jonas describes red in memories, the word "red" appears like a foreign object in the text. It doesn't fit because it's not supposed to fit. This is Lowry demonstrating that figurative language itself is transgressive in a world without metaphor.

Irony As Structural Device

The greatest irony in The Giver isn't that Jonas escapes to nowhere - it's that the community has eliminated suffering by eliminating meaning. The irony isn't in any single sentence. It's woven into the entire narrative structure. Lowry presents a world that seems utopian from the inside and dystopian from the outside, and then systematically undermines that binary until you're not sure which reading is correct. Consider the Ceremony of Twelve. Students usually read this as a turning point where Jonas gets his assignment. But the ceremony is also an ironic performance of choice in a world without choice. The announcements are random, the assignments are predetermined, and the language of destiny is pure theater. When Chairman Robert announces that Jonas will receive the unique training, he's using formal ceremonial language to dramatize something that was already decided. The irony is in the gap between the performance and the reality, and Lowry never points it out explicitly. The ending is the most debated ironic moment in YA literature. Does Jonas reach Elsewhere, or does he die? The text supports both readings, and Lowry refuses to clarify. I've seen students make case files on this question that were more elaborate than my semester thesis. The irony is that neither reading is wrong, which is also wrong. The text has trained us to expect resolution, and then it denies us. That denial is the final ironic act.

Personification And The Natural World

Nature in The Giver is almost entirely personified through Jonas's memories. The snow doesn't just fall, it remembers warmth. The river doesn't just flow, it carries stories. The sun doesn't just shine, it offers warmth that has nothing to do with temperature. This personification is Jonas's gift and his curse. He sees agency in things that the community has reduced to mechanism. Before Jonas receives memories, nature is described in purely functional terms. Rain falls because the irrigation system requires it. Sunlight exists to regulate the schedule. Personification enters the narrative only through Jonas's consciousness, which means that personification itself becomes a form of rebellion. When Jonas describes the wind as "whispering," he's not being poetic. He's being contrarian.

A Practical Method For Reading Figurative Language In The Giver

Here's what I actually tell my students to do, instead of the usual highlight-and-interpret routine. First, read the book twice. The first time through, notice every moment where figurative language appears in a world that supposedly has none. Make a list. Second time through, read that list backwards and see what pattern emerges. Second, pay attention to the grammatical person. The community speaks in passive voice almost exclusively. Actions happen without agents. "The newchild was released" not "Father released the newchild." When Jonas starts using active voice and metaphorical language, it signals his awakening. Track the shift in verb forms alongside the shift in figurative language. Third, notice what Lowry doesn't include. The Giver has almost no personification of human characters. People are described through function, not personality. This absence is as significant as the presence of nature personification. The community has removed personhood from people while preserving it for elements.

I should say that this approach doesn't work for all readers. Some students need simpler frameworks to engage with the text. The metalinguistic focus can feel abstract if you're already struggling with basic comprehension. In those cases, I start with the character analysis and loop back to figurative language once they've established that Jonas is changing. The sequence matters more than the destination. One limitation I haven't mentioned: this method assumes you have time. Teaching figurative language in The Giver takes approximately forty-five minutes per chapter if you're doing it right, which means you'll spend six to eight class periods on prose analysis alone. If your curriculum is compressed, you'll have to make choices. I usually prioritize the color metaphors and the sled imagery, then assign the rest as independent reading. It's not ideal, but it's better than skipping figurative language entirely.

Figurative Language In The Giver Beyond The Classroom

The deeper issue with figurative language in The Giver is what it teaches about language itself. Lowry shows that metaphor isn't decoration. It's cognitive infrastructure. Without metaphor, you can't conceptualize absence, you can't imagine alternatives, you can't process trauma. The community's elimination of figurative language is elimination of human complexity. That's a message that lands differently depending on whether you're fourteen or forty-four. I've had former students come back years later and tell me they finally understood the book after reading it in college. They'd missed the figurative dimensions as teenagers because they were focused on plot. By adulthood, they'd encountered enough euphemism and political language to recognize what Lowry was doing. The Giver works on different frequencies depending on your exposure to language as power. If you're teaching this book and you want to go further, I recommend pairing it with essays on Orwell's 1984, specifically the Newspeak sections. The connection between linguistic control and figurative language elimination is explicit in Orwell and implicit in Lowry. Students usually make that connection themselves once you've named it. The pairing takes two additional class periods, but it deepens the whole unit significantly.

There's also a digital humanities project at my university that does sentiment analysis on The Giver's prose across chapters. The data shows a clear shift in figurative language density beginning around chapter fourteen, which aligns with Jonas's first full memory. You can find the project repository online if you search for "Giver NLP sentiment analysis." It's raw data, not polished research, but it gives quantitative backing to what close reading alone can suggest.

What I Got Wrong After Eight Years

The biggest misconception I held early in my career was that figurative language in The Giver was primarily symbolic. It's not. Symbolism requires stable referents - the sled means X, the river means Y. Figurative language in this novel is unstable by design. The meanings shift, collapse, and contradict themselves. Lowry seems to be arguing that language itself is the problem, not any particular figure of speech. I used to tell students that Jonas's memories were "symbolic of real experience." That's sloppy. The memories aren't symbolic. They're literal experiences that Jonas has never had. The figurative language appears in his narration of those experiences because his language is expanding to accommodate new perception. The causality goes the other direction: new experience creates new figurative language, not the reverse. This distinction matters for assessment. If you grade students on whether they correctly identified "the sled as a symbol of Jonas's journey," you're reinforcing a surface reading. A better question would be: "How does Lowry's use of figurative language change as Jonas's capacity for metaphorical thinking develops?" The second question requires the same analysis but demands deeper engagement with craft.

I don't know if I'll ever stop making this mistake with new teachers. It's too easy to fall back on symbolism as a framework because it's familiar and testable. Figurative language analysis is messier, less convergent, harder to grade quickly. But the messiness is where the learning happens. The Giver rewards careful reading, and careful reading of figurative language is the only way to access what Lowry actually built. There's also the question of genre. The Giver is classified as dystopian YA, which carries certain expectations about figurative language. Dystopian fiction typically uses heavy symbolism because it's making political arguments. YA fiction typically uses heavy personification because it's centering adolescent consciousness. The Giver does both but resists both frameworks. The figurative language doesn't serve the political argument or the adolescent journey. It serves something third - the argument that political control depends on limiting language itself. If you're looking for a simpler framework, it exists. Raymond Tallis has written about how metaphor structures human cognition, and his work applies directly to The Giver. The community has eliminated metaphor to eliminate cognitive flexibility. Jonas's acquisition of metaphorical language is his acquisition of cognitive freedom. This isn't original insight - it's well-established cognitive linguistics. But it gives you a vocabulary that goes beyond "simile" and "metaphor" when you need to discuss the novel's deeper mechanisms.

The bottom line is that figurative language in The Giver isn't decorative, it's structural. Every figure of speech Lowry includes is doing narrative work. Every absence is doing thematic work. Reading the book for its figurative language is reading it for its argument about language itself. That argument doesn't change from chapter to chapter. It becomes more urgent, but it doesn't shift. The Giver has something to say about what happens when you try to think without metaphor, and it says it through the absence and presence of figurative language rather than through explicit statement. I still assign this book every year. The figurative language still surprises me. The community still feels closer than it should. The sled still hits differently depending on which chapter I'm rereading. That's what good figurative language does - it refuses to settle into fixed meaning, and it keeps asking you to look again.