Making the Change in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Social Justice through Lois Lowry’s The Giver Quartet

Abstract

Social issues and the social responsibility of individuals play an important role in Lois Lowry's Quartet. They represent the core elements that all the events in the Quartet are about. Each book depicts a society that needs to be changed, since these societies are represented as malfunctioning and cannot prosper unless there is some kind of change that would turn them into suitable places for living. This paper will focus on the Quartet's young protagonists at their missions to achieve social justice to argue that the Quartet exhibits four necessary elements and conditions for social justice to take place. These elements are: the absence of parents, the presence of unsympathetic or dysfunctional societies, the young adults' need and tendency to run away, and finally, the gifts that those protagonists possess and the sacrifices they have to make. Understanding the necessity of these elements in young adult texts would help us understand the nature of those young characters' motives and reasons for embarking upon such missions. By linking these four elements with Havighurst's (1952) “Adolescents Developmental Tasks” and Stover and Tway's (1972) adolescents' common concerns, I will move the discussion to how teachers can use these four elements in their attempts of teaching social justice through the Quartet. This discussion will provide teachers with ways to engage their students with these texts regarding what those students can tell about their roles in achieving social justice.