Messenger, the third installment of Lois Lowry's Giver Quartet, picks up several years after the close of Gathering Blue and follows Matty (Matt in Gathering Blue), who is now an adolescent. Matty now lives in Village, a settlement known for its kindness, generosity, and willingness to accept and help refugees from other settlements where inhabitants suffer at the hands of their governments—and often in the cases of people with disabilities, would face execution in their settlements of origin. Despite Village's seeming utopia, however, Matty and his guardian, the blind man Seer, begin to detect something sinister happening to Village and its residents: people are becoming selfish, and this selfishness is poisoning Village, its people, and Forest, the sentient forest that surrounds Village. Messenger suggests that the true enemy of an ideal society like Village isn't dwindling food supplies or an increasingly violent Forest, as several villagers think. Instead, the enemy exists within Village itself in the form of people's selfishness.
The guiding principle of Village is that everyone looks out for everyone else. This way, those who are disabled or need extra help, like Seer, can become an integral part of the community and give back to it in their own way. Seer, for example, is extremely wise and acts as a guardian and mentor for orphaned Matty, while Mentor teaches any child who wants to learn. The success of Village rests on the understanding that in order to function, all residents must behave in ways that are selfless and prioritize the wellbeing of the group, rather than of the individual. However, the vote to close Village to outsiders shows that even in such an ideal society, the rules that give all people a voice can also be co-opted and used for selfish means. This suggests that such a society is tenuous and must be carefully maintained by people who not only understand that working for the collective good helps them, but also see the value in helping others.
Matty soon discovers that the rise of selfishness in Village can be attributed to the goings-on at the Trade Mart. At the Trade Mart, which happens sometimes in the evenings and is presided over by a man called Trademaster, Matty discovers that people aren't just trading objects they already have for new or better things or things they need, like they do at the Market: people are trading their "true selves" (which, within the world of the novel, is often a person's sense of responsibility to the common good) for luxury items as well as for less tangible things, like physical attractiveness. While Matty never fully discerns how this is happening, the novel implies that some sort of magic is at work, as these trades appear to happen immediately when Trademaster agrees to accept a proposed trade and marks it in a special record book.
The idea that people can trade their true selves away—and that losing one's true self results in cruelty, callousness, and fear of others—suggests, first of all, that selflessness is something innate to all people and is an integral part of one's true self. While certain rules of Village that support the common good, like not lying or keeping secrets, must be learned by newcomers, the general idea that people want to look out for others is, per the logic of the novel, something that exists naturally within all people. Notably, the novel doesn't make any distinctions between trading one's true self away in order to get something that benefits someone else (as when Ramon's parents trade for a Gaming Machine to entertain Ramon and his sister) or when a person trades for something that's purely selfish (as is the case when Mentor trades to become more attractive so he can court Stocktender's widow). The novel suggests that trading away one's true self, which contains one's sense of responsibility to the common good, will harm everyone—even those who, in theory, will benefit from a trade.
The situation in Village becomes increasingly dire as the novel progresses and finally, the villagers, led by Mentor, vote to close Village to outsiders. At this point, Matty notices that a number of his friends and neighbors are ill, and nobody seems to care much. When Herbalist quarantines Ramon and his sister and suggests that whatever ails them could start an epidemic, they're not entirely wrong—where Herbalist's assessment goes wrong, however, is in suggesting that the epidemic hasn't started yet and in believing that the illness is physical, rather than emotional. Leader and Matty, however, offer up a remedy for this state of affairs: the ultimate, selfless sacrifice of one person—Matty—for the sake of the common good. When Matty uses his gift of being able to heal people with a touch of his hands to heal the rotting Forest and the residents of Village, dying in the process, he becomes an example of what, per the villagers' understanding, they should all aspire to be: selfless and willing to give up their own futures to ensure the wellbeing of Village for future generations.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Selfishness vs. the Collective Good ThemeTracker
Selfishness vs. the Collective Good Quotes in Messenger
"Were you scared of Forest?" Matty asked him. So many people were, and with good reason.
"No. It's all an illusion."
Matty frowned. He didn't know what the blind man meant. Was he saying that fear was an illusion? Or that Forest was? [...] Maybe, Matty thought, everything was an illusion to a man who had lost his eyes.
But here in Village, marks and failings were not considered flaws at all. They were valued. The blind man had been given the true name Seer and was respected for the special vision that he had behind his ruined eyes.
Others from Village rarely ventured into Forest. It was dangerous for them. Sometimes Forest closed in and entangled people who had tried to travel beyond. There had been terrible deaths, with bodies brought out strangled by vines or branches that had reached out malevolently around the throats and limbs of those who decided to leave Village. Somehow Forest knew. Somehow, too, it knew that Matty's travels were benign and necessary. The vines had never reached out for him. The trees seemed, sometimes, almost to part and usher him through.
There were no secrets in Village. It was one of the rules that Leader had proposed, and all of the people had voted in favor of it. Everyone who had come to Village from elsewhere, all of those who had not been born here, had come from places with secrets. Sometimes—not very often, for inevitably it caused sadness—people described their places of origin: places with cruel governments, harsh punishments, desperate poverty, or false comforts.
There were history books as well, like those he studied at school, the best ones filled with maps that showed how the world had changed over centuries. Some books had shiny pages that showed paintings of landscapes unlike anything Matty had ever seen, or of people costumed in odd ways, or of battles, and there were many quiet painted scenes of a woman holding a newborn child.
"It's not the fish or crops," he said. "They'll use that, of course. They argued dwindling food supply last time. It's..."
"Not enough housing?"
"More than that. I can't think of the word for it. Selfishness, I guess. It's creeping in."
Matty was startled. Village had been created out of the opposite: selflessness. He knew that from his studies and from hearing the history. Everyone did.
"Well," said Matty slowly, "when she was leaving, walking and talking with the other women, and her husband behind trying to keep up, she whirled around suddenly and scolded him for being slow."
"Slow? But he's all twisted. He can't walk any other way," the blind man said in surprise.
"I know. But she made a sneering face at him and she imitated his way of walking. She made fun of him. It was only for a second, though."
"But you're already here!" Matty reassured her. "You needn't worry! You're part of us now. They won't send you away, even if they close Village."
"It was so important to him, and he made it important to me: poetry, and language, and how we use it to remind ourselves of how our lives should be lived..."
Then her tone changed and became embittered. "Now he talks of nothing but Stocktender's window, and of closing Village to new ones. What has happened to my father?"
Some of those who had been among the most industrious, the kindest, the most stalwart citizens of Village now went to the platform and shouted out their wish that the border be closed so that "we" (Matty shuddered at the use of "we") would not have to share the resources anymore.
We need all the fish for ourselves.
Our school is not big enough to teach their children, too; only our own.
They can't even speak right. We can't understand them.
They have too many needs. We don't want to take care of them.
And finally: We've done it long enough.
Stumbling and bleeding, he wished briefly that he had brought some kind of weapon. But what would have protected him against Forest itself? It was a force too huge to fight with a knife or a club.
He saw Forest and understood what Seer had meant. It was an illusion. It was a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power that had disguised itself and almost destroyed everything. Now it was unfolding, like a flower coming into bloom, radiant with possibility.
