"The Story of Water Claire": Traumatic Memory in Lois Lowry's Fiction

Throughout her career, Lois Lowry has examined how her protagonists deal with painful memories of death and loss but rarely touched on traumatic memories. One ambiguous exception to this narrative pattern is Son, the concluding volume of the Giver Quartet. Resembling her earlier novel Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye in its interest in an infant separated from her mother, and, to a lesser degree, Rabble Starkey for its depiction of a mother disabled by psychological distress, Son differs from both through its extended attention to the traumatic memory experienced by Claire, an adolescent birth mother. Undoubtedly the conventions of young adult fiction contribute to the abrupt switch from Claire's perspective in the final third of the novel, but the narrative shift also reinforces the distinction Lowry implicitly draws between the productive potential of painful memory and the incapacitation provided by traumatic memory, a distinction that also dominates the earlier volumes of the quartet. Carter F. Hanson's thesis that memory in The Giver serves as "the primary utopian tool for opening up the future" (58) fits painful memories far better than memories that traumatize. Painful memories can lead to wisdom and action; traumatic memories paralyze.

Lowry's treatment of memory is also relevant to scholarship that regards her Number the Stars as an early example of the representation of Holocaust trauma in American children's literature. Such scholarship does not address the absence of traumatic memory in a novel that is far more concerned with the fear its child protagonist experiences during the Nazi occupation of Denmark than with any traumatic memories that might surface later. The avoidance of such memories is reinforced in the novel's final chapter, when the war is over and the protagonist eagerly awaits the return of the Jewish friend she had helped escape to Sweden. Not even the revelation that her sister had been murdered by the Nazis has a traumatic impact. The "story of Water Claire" (Son 132) not only has implications for the language scholars use in assessing Lowry's work; it also contributes to conceptualizing traumatic memory in the broader field of young people's writing.

Works Cited

Hanson, Carter F. "The Utopian Function of Memory in Lois Lowry's The Giver." Extrapolation, vol. 50, no.1, 2009, pp. 45-60. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=ucalgary&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7 CA204868852&sid=summon&asid=f1602ed67554d53fb38f315f45afcf79. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017. Lowry, Lois. Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye. Houghton Mifflin, 1978. ---. The Giver. Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1993. ---. Number the Stars. Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1989. ---. Rabble Starkey. Houghton Mifflin, 1987. ---. Son. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.