66 pages • 2 hours read
N. K. JemisinThe Fifth Season
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “you are here”
In the comm of Tirimo, Essun returns home to find her three-year-old son Uche beaten to death. Meanwhile, catastrophic events are unfolding further north in the city of Yumenes.
Yumenes was once the seat of the Sanze Empire, and still retains considerable control over the rest of the Stillness, which "moves a lot […] Like an old man lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows” (2). Multiple civilizations have risen and fallen because of these constant earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which are periodically bad enough to cause a Season. Sanze has managed to survive through several Seasons, thanks in part to comms’s careful planning: “They’ve built walls and dug wells and put away food, and they can easily last five, ten, even twenty-five years in a world without sun” (8).
Now, however, a man and woman approach Yumenes: the man is an orogene, and the woman is a stone eater named Antimony who has assumed human form. The man remarks that Sanzed stonelore (ancient commandments and proverbs) was once inscribed in stone and therefore permanent. He asks whether the stone eaters will take over the world once he has destroyed it. The woman says that’s not their goal, and the man reaches into the earth and overhead for power, tearing a huge rift in the continent that will cause a millennia-long Season.
A day later, near Tirimo, an oddly shaped lump of chalcedony emerges from the rubble caused by the rift. This rock splits open a few days later, and a being resembling a boy slowly crawls from it and begins walking towards Tirimo.
Chapter 1 Summary: “you, at the end”
Addressing Essun as “you,” the narrator explains that she is an orogene who has concealed her nature for the past decade: she settled in Tirimo, took work as a schoolteacher, married a local man named Jija, and had two children: Uche and his older sister, Nassun.
When Essun discovers Uche’s body, she sits in stunned grief for two days before a young doctor named Lerna discovers her and takes her to his house. Once she rests, Lerna explains that Tirimo’s headman, Rask, isn’t letting anyone in or out of the comm because of the shake up north. Essun, who felt for herself how strong the shake was, says she believes a Season is beginning; she also admits the shake spared Tirimo only because she used orogeny to deflect it.
Lerna assures Essun that he suspected her nature but never told anyone, and Essun reflects that Uche must have inadvertently revealed his own powers in front of Jija. By this point, however, news of Uche’s death has spread, and most of Tirimo has guessed he was an orogene; in fact, Lerna says, many comm members believe Uche caused the earthquake in Yumenes.
Lerna leaves to password of Essun’s survival to Rask. Now alone, Essun wonders what Jija has done to Nassun, and prepares to set off in pursuit of him.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Damaya, in winters past”
In a comm called Palela, Damaya sleeps in her family’s barn. She accidentally revealed her orogenic powers two weeks prior, freezing the area around her as she took in its thermal energy, and nearly killing a boy who was bullying her. She doesn’t fully understand why her parents have locked her in the barn and cowers when she hears her mother’s voice.
A man Damaya assumes is a child-buyer follows her mother into the barn. He scolds Damaya’s parents for not providing her with a toilet, then climbs into the loft where Damaya is hiding, telling her he’s here to help. Despite his unnerving appearance—the man’s eyes are so pale the irises are almost white—Damaya finds she trusts him. Before bringing her down from the loft, the man briefly presses his fingers to the back of head, explaining that this will allow him to track her.
The man asks Damaya’s mother to prepare a traveling bag, explaining that he plans to take her to the Fulcrum in Yumenes for training. At this point, Damaya realizes the man is a Guardian, and he introduces himself as Schaffa Guardian Warrant. He also tells Damaya she’s fortunate her parents reported her instead of trying to conceal her or allowing a mob to kill her. When Damaya asks why she can’t stay with her family, Schaffa tells her that untrained orogenes instinctively respond to any real or perceived threat, sometimes killing people in the process. At the Fulcrum, however, she will use her abilities to “serve the world” (34).
Damaya begins to cry, and Schaffa reassures her that being born an orogene is not a punishment or judgment. After an awkward goodbye to her parents, Damaya and Schaffa set off.
Chapter 3 Summary: “you’re on your way”
Essun considers her options: she assumes Nassun is dead but doesn’t know where Jija buried her, and she realizes that the people of Tirimo will soon deduce that she is an orogene and hunt her down.
Retrieving a travel bag from her home, Essun sets off in search of Rask. Tirimo already started to put emergency measures (including a lockdown and curfew) in place, and no one notices as Essay makes her way to Rask’s favorite spot—the local library. Here, she reassures Rask she means no harm: she simply wants to find Jija. Rask doesn’t know where Jija has gone, but says some people spotted him leaving town with Nassun.
Essun asks Rask for a gate pass, and Rask agrees. He also offers to escort her to the gate, confiding that his sister was an orogene and murdered when he was six.
The guards at the gate are reluctant to let Essun pass. Rask orders them to do so, but as Essun walks by, a woman tries to shoot her with a crossbow. Essun freezes the bolt as the earth begins to shake. Realizing what’s happening, Rask begs Essun to stop, but “the attempt on [her] life has triggered something raw and furious and cold” (57). Essun splits open the valley floor, ruining the town’s aquifer, and freezes several people, including Rask; it’s only when a child screams that she stops before destroying the entire town. She leaves Tirimo, reflecting that it was foolish to think she could escape death by running away: “Death was always here. Death is [her]” (60).
Chapter 4 Summary: “Syenite, cut and polished”
At the Fulcrum, a young orogene named Syenite meets with her superior, Feldspar. Feldspar informs Syen of her new assignment: Working under the supervision of a new mentor, she’ll clear some coral blocking the harbor of the comm of Allia. Syen resents the implication that she needs help, but she’s flattered to learn her new mentor is a “ten-ringer”—the highest rank possible for an orogene.
Suppressing her irritation, Syen calls on her new mentor, whom she discovers—with some jealousy—has an entire suite of rooms to himself. A middle-aged man responds to her knock, “wearing a rumpled robe, one side of his hair flattened, fabric lines painting a haphazard map over his cheek” (67). Annoyed, he tries to send Syen away, forcing her to bluntly state that she’s “here to fuck [him], Earth burn it” (69).
The man lets her in, explaining that he didn’t think he’d be already expected to produce another child. Syen is startled to learn that he’s been through the process before, then reflects that the process of pairing orogenes for breeding purposes is rarely discussed.
Syen wants to get the sex over with: Even if her mentor refuses her—something he has the right to do, as a ten-ringer—she’ll just be paired with someone else. Her mentor is both bitter and reluctant, remarking that he personally was the product of the Fulcrum’s breeding program. Nevertheless, he finally gives in to Syen’s urging, and the two have awkward and clinical sex. Afterwards, Syen tells the man they set off for Allia the next day and then leaves, still angry about the situation but hopeful that the assignment will help her earn her fifth ring.
Prologue-Chapter 4 Analysis
The first few chapters of The Fifth Season establish the novel’s largely unconventional structure. Perhaps most obviously, the novel begins with an event that would seem to mark the end of any possible story: Alabaster’s opening of the continental rift. The casual tone Jemisin employs in the novel’s first few lines further underscores the unexpectedness of her narrative decision: “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things” (1).
It soon becomes clear, however, that this apparent dissonance between tone and subject matter actually reflects the reality of life in the Stillness, where cataclysmic Seasons are the norm, but some form of human society always manages to persist. Although Jemisin insists that this Season truly will constitute a kind of ending, she also concedes, “This has happened before,” and that “the ending of one story is just the beginning of another” (14). Apocalypse, in other words, may not mean the cessation of all life; at least in the context of the Broken Earth trilogy, it may simply mean a decisive break with a prior era, or the radical transformation of a person or society.
This idea also informs Jemisin’s decision to tell the main character’s story as though it belonged to three different people. The novel doesn’t explicitly acknowledge that Essun, Damaya, and Syenite are all the same woman until roughly two-thirds of the way through, and if certain moments foreshadow the revelation (it’s already clear in Chapter 1, for instance, that “Essun” is an assumed name), the characterization of the three women tends to discourage it. Essun, Damaya, and Syen all emerge as distinct personalities: Damaya is intelligent and curious but shy; Syen is cynical, quick-witted, and confident. Essun, meanwhile, shares Damaya’s reserve, but her own quiet nature seems less the product of fear than it is of caution; she’s also more conventionally maternal than Syen. By telling the main character’s story in three parts, Jemisin therefore applies the motif of apocalypse and transformation to an individual human life: The crises the character experiences in each plot line are so devastating that they constitute a series of figurative deaths from which she emerges alive but fundamentally changed.
Finally, there is Jemisin’s decision to recount Essun’s story in the second person. The full rationale for this involves the plot of the entire Broken Earth trilogy, and only becomes clear near the end of The Stone Sky—the final book in the series. Nevertheless, the use of the second person is so uncommon in narrative fiction that it also has implications for any interpretation of character and theme. In particular, the choice to position the reader as Essun encourages that reader to even more strongly identify with her than possible with a character written in the first or third person. Since Essun is an orogene, the practical effect of this is to force the reader to experience the Sanzed social hierarchy from the perspective of its most marginalized class of people. This, in turn, relates to one of the reasons The Fifth Season explores themes of power and exploitation in a fantasy setting: By showing the way these forces operate in a world that isn’t (and couldn’t) be real, the novel sidesteps some of the cultural baggage associated with real-world instances of oppression, allowing the reader to consider it in a less emotionally fraught way.
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By N. K. Jemisin
