107 pages • 3 hours read
Trenton Lee StewartThe Mysterious Benedict Society
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Trouble with Children, or Why They Are Necessary”
Rhonda takes the children to meet Mr. Benedict, who congratulates them. He refers to the test administrator as “Number Two.”
Mr. Benedict says they are waiting for Constance Contraire. He shares some of Constance’s test answers, which he finds amusing. As he laughs, he falls asleep, and Rhonda leaps forward to catch him. In a minute Mr. Benedict wakes up and explains that he has narcolepsy, which is usually triggered by strong emotion. Number Two and Milligan enter with Constance, who is tiny.
Mr. Benedict has long conducted the tests hoping to establish a team of children to help him with an urgent project. He has never before found enough qualified children to form a team. Mr. Benedict warns them that this mission will be dangerous and may risk their lives.
Mr. Benedict asks what all four of them have in common. The others reply that they passed the tests, that they are children, and that they are gifted, but Reynie observes that they are all alone. The advertisement had been addressed to children, not parents, which Reynie found odd. Now he understands that the advertisement was geared toward children who do not have parents. He and Kate are orphans, he guesses Constance may be as well, and he believes that Sticky is hiding something about himself.
Mr. Benedict confirms that Sticky is a runaway and Constance lives secretly in a public library by herself. He appears genuinely compassionate about their situations, and he gazes at them with “a mixture of great pride and great sympathy” (81). Mr. Benedict tells the children that they are the best team he could have hoped for and that they are needed immediately.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Sender and the Messages”
Kate immediately agrees to join the team. Reynie considers then agrees as well. Constance is skeptical, but Mr. Benedict appeases her by saying that no one will make her do anything. Sticky is very reluctant to join them, but Reynie encourages him to stay.
In the morning Rhonda tells the children that they should never go out anywhere without Milligan. In an emergency they must ring the bell on the landing at the top of the stairs.
Mr. Benedict explains the nature of their mission. While researching the human brain, Mr. Benedict discovered that messages were being delivered directly to people’s minds without their knowledge.
Mr. Benedict shows the children an apparatus called the Receiver. Number Two turns it on, and an ordinary news report on the television transforms, with the announcer’s voice changing into a child’s voice chanting nonsensical rhymes. Mr. Benedict explains that the coded messages piggyback on signals from television, radio, and cell phones. The Sender uses children to transmit the messages because adults routinely ignore what children say.
The testing Mr. Benedict conducts enables him to find children uniquely able to resist the messages, because they possess an unusually powerful love of the truth.
Mr. Benedict says that government officials investigating the threat vanished, and their replacements refuse to investigate further. One of the primary hidden messages convinces people that “the missing are not missing, only departed” (103).
The bell on the landing begins clanging.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Men in the Maze”
Mr. Benedict falls asleep. The lights go out, and Constance screams. Kate finds her flashlight and sees that Constance is gone.
Milligan takes the children into the maze to find Constance. He tells Kate to turn off her flashlight, which will only help “them” find the children. They see flashlight beams passing through one of the other rooms and hear Constance cry out in pain.
Milligan says he can smell cologne, and a man’s voice tells them to turn around slowly. The flashlights turn on again, and they see two men smiling amicably. Constance is in a bag, stunned by electrical shock.
A tall man pleasantly tells them to raise their hands. Milligan suddenly leaps through the open doorway. The men laugh and say that Milligan was not a very good protector. Abruptly the men drop their flashlights and slump to the floor. Milligan stands in the doorway with a tranquilizer gun.
Mr. Benedict explains that the men are professional kidnappers who work for the Sender. They intended to take the children to a school called the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened. Reynie guesses that the secret messages are coming from the Institute, and Mr. Benedict replies that he believes that the school was created for that exact purpose. He plans to send the children there as his secret agents.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Codes and Histories”
The children’s mission will be to enter as students at the Institute and learn as much as they can. The Sender uses top students there to transmit messages, so they should try and gain access to that information. Mr. Benedict expects the children to report to him often, using Morse code. Sticky already knows Morse code and offers to teach the others.
Using a flashlight, Constance uses her new skill to flash the message “Why did you run?” to Sticky (120). Sticky shares that he had a happy childhood until he displayed intellectual gifts. His parents entered him in quiz contests, which he won easily, but they increasingly pressured him to continue until he was exhausted, so Sticky pretended to run away from home. When Sticky overheard his father say they were better off without him, he ran away for good.
Milligan tells the children that years ago, he was kidnapped and could not remember anything, not even his name. He handcuffed his abductors and escaped. The men who abducted him were the same men who tried to capture the children in the house maze. Milligan found Mr. Benedict and began to work for him.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
Reynie, Sticky, and Kate meet Constance, a very small, antagonistic girl and the fourth member of their team. Constance is rude and headstrong, repeatedly shocking Reynie with her impropriety, but Mr. Benedict appears to find Constance delightful.
Mr. Benedict searched many years for the right children to combat the threat of the Sender. Through his testing, Mr. Benedict found Number Two and Rhonda, but they were isolated cases. As “children do not remain children for long, […] herein has lain the difficulty” (78).
Mr. Benedict says that their mission will be dangerous, which appeals to Kate and frightens Sticky. It is a strange threat that they face, hidden messages sent directly into people’s brains without their knowledge. Mr. Benedict explains that the “Sender has discovered how to control the adhesive property of thoughts” (99). This phrase clarifies what the Sender is doing to people, that thoughts are drawn to the signals and stick to them like metal to a magnet.
A final qualification for the children’s acceptance into the team is their natural resistance to the Sender’s messages, which stems from “an unusually powerful love of truth” (102). The team’s unique ability to resist these hidden messages will become vital as they try to infiltrate the Institute.
As Mr. Benedict explains the Sender’s plot, the children learn that they are the only hope to defeat him. Adults who tried to investigate the Institute disappeared, and there is no hope for further investigations, as the “hidden messages have convinced everyone of the Institute’s great virtue” (115). The attempted kidnapping proves the Sender’s sinister intentions.
One of the themes of these chapters is how Reynie feels part of something bigger than himself for the first time, which appeals to him and convinces him to accept the risk and separation from Miss Perumal. It is a “strange sense of duty, not to mention a powerful curiosity” (84), that compels him to join.
This section also reveals the personal histories of Sticky and Milligan. The other children are dismayed by Sticky’s story of why he ran away and how his parents used him for financial gain. This manipulation was a blow to Sticky, because he had thought his family was happy prior to his parents forcing him to win quiz contests. The greatest blow of all came when Sticky’s father said the family would be better off without Sticky. This shocks the other children, who dream of having parents. The notion that having parents might be worse than not having them is traumatic.
The children also learn Milligan’s personal history. Who he is and what he was before his memory was stripped from him is a great mystery. Mr. Benedict guesses that Milligan must have been a secret agent of some kind, to have developed the skills he had upon waking with amnesia, like creating tools with his fingernails and toenails, and picking handcuffs. In his own way Milligan is like the children, a talented lost soul who found his way to help Mr. Benedict with his mission.
Related Titles
By Trenton Lee Stewart
