Remembering a Present-Oriented Future in Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993)

Abstract

Futures Studies as a multidisciplinary academic field developed in the last decades has emphasized the meaningful and revealing nature of the images of the future originating in every society. In this sense, Piotr M. Szpunar and Karl K. Szpunar (2016) underline the close relationship between recalling the past and imagining the future and suggest a mutual influence and interdependence between both processes. The purpose of this article is to apply the concept of “collective future thought” coined by these authors to the analysis of The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry, which depicts a future dystopian society where memories of the past, as a powerful and threatening artifact, are kept away from the members of the community. This novel has been extensively analyzed as a dystopian text from many different perspectives. However, no critical attention has been paid to the way Lowry explores the close interrelationship and interdependence between the visions of past and future created by a society and their bonds of reciprocal interaction. Starting from a consideration of The Giver as dystopian fiction, this research attempts to move the critical exploration of this novel one step further and claims that a more nuanced understanding of the text can be achieved by considering the contributions from the field of Futures Studies and the concepts of collective memory and collective future thinking.