Selfishness vs. the Collective Good Theme Analysis

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.