What is "Elsewhere"?

"Elsewhere" in The Giver is the unknown place beyond Jonas’s carefully controlled community, and it is also the word the community uses to hide the truth about "release," or euthanasia.

At first, Jonas and the others think Elsewhere is a real outside place where released people go. The old and sick are believed to be sent there, and people who do not fit into the community can apply for release. Asher says, “If you don’t fit in, you can apply for Elsewhere and be released.” Larissa, at the House of the Old, describes Roberto’s release as joyful, saying he walked through the special door with “Pure happiness.” To the community, Elsewhere sounds peaceful and ordinary, a place just outside their lives.

Jonas gradually learns that this belief is false when The Giver shows him his father releasing an infant. Jonas watches his father inject the newborn with a syringe, then put the body in a carton and send it away. Jonas realizes that release means being killed, and that Elsewhere is just a comforting word that keeps people from understanding death.

There is also a real outside world beyond the community. The river marks the border, and Jonas begins to understand it as leading away from Sameness, seeing that it has “an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going.” When Jonas escapes with Gabriel, he crosses the river and eventually reaches a snow-covered hill, colored lights, houses, and music. The ending leaves open whether this place is an actual community beyond Sameness or a vision as Jonas and Gabriel are dying.

Elsewhere represents both the community’s lie and Jonas’s hope. It is the name for death inside the system and also the name for whatever may exist beyond a life without memory, love, choice, or pain.