The Giver ends with Jonas’s rejection of his community’s ideal of Sameness. He decides to rescue Gabriel and escape the community, and they grow steadily weaker as they travel through an unfamiliar wintery landscape. At the top of a hill, Jonas finds a sled and rides it down toward a community with lit windows and music. Lowry does not confirm whether the two survive, because the reader can either interpret the sled as a hallucination of Jonas’s dying mind, or as a fortunate coincidence. Upon first seeing the top of the hill, Jonas believes that he remembers the place, and it is “a memory of his own,” as opposed to one from the Giver. Because Jonas doesn’t have his own memories of snow, the meaning of this sentence is not obvious. This confusion could signify Jonas’s deterioration. However, Jonas may also recognize that the hill and sled signify the presence of a community that allows for sleds and snow. Jonas calls his destination “Elsewhere,” an ambiguous term because the community uses it both to refer to places outside the community and the destination of people who have been “released,” or euthanized. Additionally, the reader cannot take the lights Jonas sees in the windows at face value. Light symbolizes hope, but people also often talk about seeing light right before death.
They went to the railroad stations and bought tickets for the fast trains and the slow trains and even the trains that back up and run backward instead of where they start to go.
