44 pages • 1 hour read
Jeanne DuPrauThe City of Ember
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “On Night Street”
Granny’s confusion worsens; Lina appreciates the way Mrs. Murdo helps by keeping Granny company, tending to Poppy, and making breakfast. Lina overhears in the market line that a shop on Night Street has colored pencils. After debating the expense of such a luxury, she takes Poppy and heads to the shop. She passes a man named Sadge on the steps of the Gathering Hall, calling out woeful descriptions of his journey to the Unknown Regions. Nearby, Believers, a pseudo-religious group, sing to a pipe player; Lina wonders what they mean when they sing “Soon, soon, coming soon” (74). Once in the Night Street shop, Lina realizes the shopkeeper is Looper, the man who sent a message to Mayor Cole. Lina worries over the expensive purchase, but she chooses a blue and a green pencil and pays. When Lina turns to leave, Poppy is gone. She runs outside to look for her, but the lights go off.
Lina panics during the whole long blackout. Finally the lights come back on. She resumes looking for Poppy; a few people chastise her for losing a baby, but soon Doon comes out of a shop holding Poppy’s hand. Relieved, Lina thanks him sincerely. Back at home, Lina blames losing Poppy on her own greed for the pencils.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Box in the Closet”
No one wants to talk about the blackout event though, at seven minutes, it lasted far longer than any previous blackout. Mayor Cole encourages a large crowd at a public meeting that “solutions are being found” (87), but the mob grows restless when they cannot hear his words clearly through the bullhorn. Lina barely escapes as the crowd surges forward. Mayor Cole escapes into the Gathering Hall. Doon and his father are there as well; Doon is frustrated by the mayor’s lies. Back home, Lina discovers Granny cleaning a closet packed with old things, searching for the important item mentioned by her grandfather. Among the items Granny shoved aside, Lina picks up a curious box with a lock on it that has opened. A thick piece of paper “covered with small, perfect printing” (92) had been in the box, but Poppy shredded and chewed it just before Lina arrived home.
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Message Full of Holes”
Lina sees pieces of a numbered list on many of the scraps, and that evening she puzzles the pieces together. Very few full words remain on the document, but Lina can tell that the heading included the word Instructions. She uses some glue to adhere the scraps to another piece of paper. The next day she asks Captain Fleery to come see the document. Captain Fleery guesses it was a recipe because one phrase is small steel pan. Seeing Lina’s anxiety, Captain Fleery tells Lina that she and the other Believers know the Builders will soon return to save them all. She gives Lina the day off to rest. Lina waits in line for her friend Lizzie Bisco at the Supply Depot counter the next day, thinking about how when Granny was young, schoolchildren took tours of the vast storerooms of Ember. Now, far too many storerooms sit empty for tours. Lizzie agrees to come see the document after work, but when she arrives, she has no suggestions regarding its meaning, and only briefly considers it at all before returning to frivolous chatter. Lina wonders why she thought to ask her at all.
Lina writes a note to Mayor Cole indicating she may have found something important and leaves the note on the guard’s desk in the Gathering Hall. Over the next few days, Lina spends her small increments of free time copying over a whole version of the patchy document. She also figures out the words official, Pipeworks, riverbank, and door. Excited by these discoveries, Lina realizes the perfect person to show the document to is Doon.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Explorations”
Doon explores the Pipeworks once he completes his assigned work task each day. One day he finds a small slimy creature wearing a spiral shell, but when co-workers call him “bug-boy,” he angers quickly and accidentally steps on the creature. He finds a roped-off tunnel with a sign reading “Caved In. No Entry” (115), but he goes down it anyway, finding a hatch in the ceiling and no cave-in. Near the place where the river disappears into a hole in the Pipeworks wall, he finds strange rocks with odd lines carved by water. He cannot find anything that might be important, so he goes on Thursday to the Ember library, curious about making a movable light. He tries looking up fire amongst the many handwritten packets of written content but finds only information on the danger of burning. He also finds a packet called Mysterious Words from the Past. One entry is “All in the same boat. Means ‘all in the same predicament.’ The meaning of ‘boat’ is unknown” (120). As he replaces this book, Lina comes in looking for him.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
The rising action events in Chapters 5-8 promote a steady intensification of the overall conflict. This occurs on both a personal and individual level (with Lina and Doon each facing their own challenges) as well as on a general level (as widespread worry and gloominess spread throughout the citizens of Ember). Tonally, this atmosphere of concern in the city reaches an unexpected panic stage at the Gathering Hall meeting, as Lina is almost powerless in the ebb and flow of frustrated citizens demanding clarity from the mayor. The rushed mob is well-primed with days’ worth of stress and anxiety; from Sadge’s self-assigned new role as doomsday predictor to the record-breaking seven-minute blackout, folks in Ember are more than ready for some word from Mayor Cole that will soothe their fear. Instead, the crackling, fuzzy bullhorn, a strong symbol of truths hidden in plain sight, irritates the already irate crowd, and they demand better with no result.
Meanwhile, Lina’s personal challenges escalate on several fronts. Her grandmother is more confused; the found Instructions are exciting but unintelligible; no one she initially seeks out seems to understand the words on the document—or care. Even the purchase of two colored pencils, originally an exciting relief from her worries, leaves her regretful: “When she held them, she remembered the powerful wanting she had felt in that dusty store, and the feeling of it was mixed up with fear and shame and darkness” (83). Lina’s attempt to get her friend Lizzie’s help with the document is especially difficult for her; not only is Lizzie disinterested by the Instructions, but she also turns their chat toward herself many times. Though the two do not leave on bad terms, Lina makes the hard discovery that differences between Lizzie and her are much more apparent now that they were growing up. Lizzie’s comments about a secret she cannot share with Lina foreshadow her upcoming role, and Lizzie’s desire to talk mostly about herself, her job, and her struggles contribute to the theme of “Selfishness Versus Selflessness”. Lina’s disappointment in Lizzie also motivates her to seek out Doon, helping to move the plot forward and restore Lina and Doon’s friendship.
Doon shows increasing interior conflict and frustration with his inability to help save Ember. The taunting from his co-workers causes him to boil over again, this time with a destructive result: He inadvertently crushes the snail he just found, and he is immediately remorseful. Crucially, Doon’s moment of shame and regret parallels Lina’s after she loses Poppy in her greed for the pencils. Both characters realize through regret that choices are important—increasingly so as one gets older—and though neither character articulates their change of heart at this time, both will begin to reason more deeply from now on instead of allowing temper or material wants to influence them.
Lina and Doon’s valuable lesson about decision-making separates them from their fellow Emberites, who remain stagnant, inactive, and unfulfilled. This is a necessary step in establishing the two protagonists as worthy and capable saviors as they pursue their quest for truth. In the immediate, Lina realizes she should go to Doon for partnership in decrypting the document, as he spoke the difficult truth way back on Assignment Day: “The more she thought about Doon, the more it seemed he was the very person—the only person—who might be interested in what she had found” (112). Doon, similarly, realizes the Pipeworks may not hold as many answers as generations’ worth of information packets in the Ember library. He goes seeking a how-to on making light portable; she goes seeking him; the crucial plot point of archetypal Heroes coming together occurs at the end of Chapter 8, and they establish this new partnership in the library, a symbol for knowledge and answers.
Several plot discoveries and complications rely on coincidence and chance, a minor theme in the rising action of the novel. For example, Lina happens to hear about the colored pencils from random people in a queue; the result of her decision to seek out the pencils is near disaster as Poppy might have gotten hurt in the blackout. Lina happens to arrive home just in time to save the shreds of Instructions; a few minutes later, they might have made their way to Poppy’s mouth. DuPrau uses these moments of fate to emphasize the dramatic tension of the novel and to maintain the reader’s awareness of the disastrous consequences should Lina and Doon fail in their quickly developing quest.
