Messenger

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. How can young people participate in creating the future of their societies? How do characters in young adult literature often shape their communities’ futures?

Teaching Suggestion: These questions can be used to deliver series context on The Giver Quartet, as the above questions engage themes integral to the entire series. Messenger is the third book in the 4-book series and references characters and events from the previous two books. While the novel is self-contained and can be read as a standalone, understanding how Messenger builds upon the themes established by The Giver and Gathering Blue will help students construct a deeper understanding of the novel. Series context will also offer students additional insight into characters and relationships in the text; this context can be bridged into an activity that prompts students to predict the important themes of Messenger. Because the concept of community and the role of young people in creating positive change for their societies are so prominent across all books in the series, these discussion questions will prepare students to engage with Messenger’s themes of Honesty, Openness, and Secrets; Selfishness Versus the Collective Good; and Identity, Diversity, and Difference.

• This 5-minute interview with Lois Lowry from the American Library Association’s 2014 Annual Conference offers insight into her inspiration for The Giver and contains commentary on the unifying theme of young people shaping the future of their communities across the Giver series. (The final ~2 minutes [starting at ~3:09] discuss the Giver movie adaptation and Lowry’s role in its production, which may not be relevant to class discussion.) 
• Lois Lowry’s official website offers features such as an author biography, synopses of each book in the Giver series, transcripts of speeches Lowry has given, and more.
• If it is likely that some students are familiar with the 2014 film adaptation of The Giver, showing The Giver film trailer from Walden Media may elicit connections to prior knowledge about the series or bridge into an activity wherein students may speculate on the important events and themes in the first novel and infer how they may connect to Messenger.

2. What are the typical components of setting in a story? How does setting help an author communicate important ideas? How can an author use the setting to create tone, mood, atmosphere, or to propel conflict and character development? How can a setting become a character on its own?

Teaching Suggestion: Students may be prompted to first connect to prior knowledge regarding setting as a basic story element before exploring new ideas like setting as a character and its role in supporting other story elements like plot and character. These questions will allow students to develop an understanding of the role of setting in a story beyond just providing a location or a backdrop for events, preparing them to analyze Forest in the novel as a personified force and character in its own right and its role in propelling conflict and communicating themes.

• This 6-minute video from Oregon State University’s School of Writing, Literature, and Film explains the role of setting in literature and how it informs the reader’s understanding of a story. It offers students guidance on how to analyze a setting’s impact on its story’s themes and characters.
• This article from Writer’s Digest discusses techniques for creating complex, richly characterized settings. Although it is intended as a resource for writers, the information in this article may be useful for introducing students to techniques authors use to create settings that impact the story.
• SuperSummary’s guide to setting offers further examples, definitions, and resources regarding setting as a literary device.

Short Activity

Matty’s Village in the novel is a haven, where physical differences are celebrated and all citizens live in harmony, helping and supporting one another. If you could create the perfect society, what would it be like? What kinds of problems would you try to solve? Draw a picture or write a short reflection piece describing your perfect world.   

Teaching Suggestion: It may be helpful to review these or similar resources as a class before attempting the activity so that students have a clear understanding of the purpose and expectations of the activity. Students might present or share their utopias in small groups and then be prompted to notice their utopias’ shared qualities, springboarding into a discussion on the characteristics of a utopia. This activity and its paired resources will provide an entry point into thinking about the text as dystopian literature and the setting of Village as a utopia-turned-dystopia.

If students are unfamiliar with the concepts of utopia and dystopia, it may be helpful to introduce dystopia to students through lenses with which they might already be familiar, such as popular dystopias like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games or George Orwell’s 1984.

The activity may also bridge into delivering further series context through discussion of how the society in The Giver is presented as a utopia but is revealed to be a dystopia, while Kira’s village (and the origin village of Matty, the protagonist in Messenger) in Gathering Blue is unequivocally a dystopia.

• This 6-minute video from TED-Ed, “How to Recognize a Dystopia” by Alex Gendler, offers brief philosophical and historical context for the concept of a utopia, and historical and literary context for dystopian societies. The questions at the end of this video regarding the consequences of believing that humanity can be “molded into a perfect shape” may be beneficial questions for students to consider after creating their own utopias. How might their vision for a perfect world be corrupted by attempts to carry out its own ideals? This will prepare students to analyze Village’s transformation in the novel.
• This library guide from Miami-Dade College offers detailed context on the characteristics and definitions of utopias and dystopias, with examples provided of historical, contemporary, and literary dystopian and utopian societies.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who would benefit from an extra challenge, this activity can be extended into research tasks that prompt analysis of a historical speech that promotes an ideal for a better world (such as Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech). Students may analyze the vision depicted within the speech and evaluate how it reflects a utopian vision that seeks to rectify present problems.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

What would you be willing to give up in order to gain something that you really, really want? Do you think compromising your values is ever worth what you might receive in exchange?

Teaching Suggestion: This prompt, appropriate for independent reflection and journaling, will prepare students to engage with the novel’s themes on Selfishness Versus the Collective Good and Identity, Difference, and Diversity. The Trade Mart is a significant symbol in the novel of the price associated with indulging selfish desires over helping others. The consequences of trading at Trade Mart include losing one’s “true self” and becoming less tolerant of differences. This personal connection prompt represents an entry point into the text wherein students can consider the cost of forsaking their values and the importance of unselfish care for others.