In chapter 7 of Jeanne DuPrau's The City of Ember, after Lina
salvages what is left of the important-looking piece of paper her baby sister
Poppy has chewed up, Lina shows a couple of different people. First, she shows
Captain Fleery, her messenger captain, who is uninterested; then she shows her
friend Lizzie, who is equally uninterested. Since she knows her grandmother had
been looking for something lost that had been stored when Lina's
great-great-grandfather was mayor, Lina decides it may be important enough to
share with the current mayor, but he never replies to her message. In the
evenings, during her free time, she studies the scraps of
paper, trying to figure out what the words say. When she gets as far
as recognizing the wordPipeworks, Lina
decides to show Doon, since Doon works in and knows all about
the Pipeworks.
Based on the...
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word instructions that is still intact in the title, Lina
knows the paper contains some sort of instructions related to the mayor's
office. She also recognizes the typeset of the Builders and believes the paper
contains instructions for the mayor written by the Builders. After continuing
to study the scrap, she concludes the paper contains the wordsriverbank, door, and Pipeworks. She wonders if the
paper is speaking of a door that "led to the other city" and draws the
following conclusion:
The message had something to do with the river, a door, and the Pipeworks. And who did she know who knew about the Pipeworks? Doon, of course. (Ch. 7)
She then decides to show Doon the piece of paper and concludes it is the right thing to do because she knows he is serious, constantly studying things, very curious, and even wants to save the city; she knows he is the sort of person who would be willing to figure out the mystery, especially if the mystery can help save the city.
How do the people of Ember handle power outages in The City of Ember? Why does Lina show Doon the paper?
In Jeanne DuPrau's The City of Ember, people have varying
responses to the power outages that, in the opening chapter, Doon
argues with the mayor are getting worse. Most people are completely
oblivious that there is a problem. Doon seems to be one of the only
ones in Ember who is aware there is a problem and wants to do something about
it. In contrast, people like the Believers, who recognize
there is a problem, believe in passively waiting to be rescued by the city's
Builders. Reactions begin growing more intense when the
longest blackout the people have ever experienced occurs in chapter 5. By
chapter 6, we learn that the blackout lasted 7 minutes, and people are so
terrified that they don't even speak about it.
In chapter 6, the mayor calls a town meeting in which he vaguely assures the
citizens that "solutions are being found" but does not yield to the citizens'
demands to know exactly what solutions are being sought after. The town
breaks out into a riot, "hurling whatever they could
find--pebbles, garbage, crumpled paper, even their own hats." Similarly,
Doon expresses anger towards his father about the mayor's
empty speech and empty response, but Doon's father discourages him from being
angry because anger controls a person. Rather than being angry, Doon's father
wants Doon to actively pursue a solution. As the story progresses, Lina finds a
piece of paper she thinks contains clues to the way out of the city, and she
and Doon embark on decoding the message to save the city.