History Literature / TheGiver

* HeroesWantRedheads: Our protagonist Jonas has his Stirrings for Fiona, who has red hair.

* SuicideIsShameful: [[spoiler:Rosemary applied for Release six weeks into her training. She was made an {{Unperson}} and the Community refused to pass on her name to new babies.]]
** Though this is less because the community views Suicide as shameful [[spoiler: since it is done all the time]] so much as the specific fact that [[spoiler: she was a Receiver and thus let the suppressed memories and knowledge out into the community.]]

* OneTwinMustDie: [[spoiler:Whenever a Birthmother has twins, one of them is Released to prevent any confusion between them. The Giver shows Jonas a camera feed of his father Releasing the smaller of a pair of male twins before dumping its body down a trash chute.]]

* DramaticTVShutoff: Every room in Community is fitted with a two-way speaker for making announcements, giving orders, and general communication. When the Giver ''turns his speaker off'', Jonas is quite startled.

* ImportantHairAccessory: All the girls of the Community wear long braided hair with ribbons at the ends until the Ceremony of Nine, where the ribbons are removed and all the children are given bikes. (The next year, they all get [[ImportantHaircut their hair cut short]].)

* ImportantHairAccessory: All the girls of the Community wear long hair with ribbons at the ends until the Ceremony of Nine, where the ribbons are removed and all the children are given bikes. (The next year, they all get [[ImportantHaircut their hair cut short]].)

* {{Deconstruction}}: ''The Giver'' is actually a {{deconstruction}} of utopias and their necessary maintenance. In the slow revelation of the underlying rules The Community is built upon, it becomes apparent that played realistically utopias may become dystopias of their own.

** When he later [[spoiler: STOPS taking the pills]], he has several more "pleasurable" dreams -- though who/what they're about is not stated.

* InTheFutureHumansWillBeOneRace: All humans in the Community are bred to more or less the same physical features. Differences such as Fiona's red hair and Jonas's blue eyes are regarded as a fault.
** Not that anyone besides the Giver and Receiver notice the color. And, while most of the names are western (Gabriel, Jonas, Fiona, Rosemary, Lily), there is a Yoshiko mentioned once.
* IndividualityIsIllegal: See TheEvilsOfFreeWill above. The Community is run by a very precise set of rules -- people have been engineered so that they all look the same, experience more or less the same things, and react with the same quiet contentment and patience, and any deviance from this (see Asher's "snack"/"smack" incident) is punished. Breaking serious rules three times results in Release.

* DidntSeeThatComing: For all the community's thought-out plans to keep everyone orderly, they didn't consider that [[spoiler:the token Receiver of Memory wouldn't want to bear all the pain and pleasure from the past. Rosemary's suicide took them by shock, and no one anticipates Jonas's rebellion]].

* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:Rosemary applies for Release after a few days of unhappy memories, and she injected herself when they asked her to roll up her sleeve. The Giver implies that he [[TogetherInDeath will follow her]] once the Community no longer needs him.]]

* PopulationControl: Every family unit is allowed two children, one girl and one boy. If a child dies, the parents can apply to be given another baby of the same gender and same name as a replacement. However, they come from Birthmothers, who only have 3 children, then a lifetime of menial labor. Even then, only 50 newchildren are given to family units each December.

* NewSpeak: The Community enforces what is called "precision of language." Children are strongly reprimanded for using any kind of exaggeration or figurative language, because they lump it under "lying". (The example given is a child who says he is starving when he is only very hungry, because implying that the Community would really let anyone starve is seen as extremely problematic.) They can still play pretend, though, so it doesn't hamper their imaginative thinking. Additionally, due to the Giver system, a great deal of the very concepts of the old world (starvation, war, etc) have been or are in the process of being completely scrubbed out of the collective consciousness this way almost passively. ReleasedToElsewhere is a prime example: it is a DeadlyEuphemism that nobody save the Giver even ''knows'' is a euphemism because they have ceased to have virtually any concept of death. Which means that the authorities that order it and the doctors that perform it likely ''[[ObliviouslyEvil don't even realize the full ramifications of what they are doing]]''. In short: [[UpToEleven Newspeak so powerful and entrenched that even those that mandate it and enforce don't really recognize it for what it is.]]