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The Instructions & Chapters 1–3

Summary: The Instructions

As construction of the city of Ember concludes, its chief “Builder” and his assistant discuss the future. They are unsure of what will follow but, without revealing why, determine that the city’s inhabitants need to live there for at least 200 years. So that Ember’s future citizens will know what to do at that time, the chief then reveals a grand plan: They will provide Ember with instructions, sealed inside a box with a timed lock set to open on its own at the right date. Sworn to secrecy, only the city’s mayors, one after the next, will know about the box and its hiding place in Ember’s Gathering Hall. None will know what is inside the box, only that the contents contain critical information for Ember’s people. 

All goes according to the Builders’ plan until an immoral mayor, the city’s seventh, takes possession of the box. Plagued with a coughing sickness, common in Ember at the time, he brings it home, hoping to find a cure that will save him. Although he fails to open the box, he damages it. After the corrupt mayor dies, the box ends up in a closet. The box remains there for generations, until finally clicking open at the programmed time.

Summary: Chapter 1: Assignment Day

It’s year 241 and Ember is old, in disrepair, and dark. With no natural light, its only illumination comes from light bulbs and streetlamps. Electricity shuts off nightly, and power outages, which result in blackouts, are common during the day. Children attend school until they are twelve years old. On Assignment Day the children enter the adult workforce. 

At Ember School, Mayor Cole arrives with a bag holding the fate of all twenty-four students in the graduating class: the job they will do for the next three years. Lizzie Bisco stands first and draws Clerk at the Supply Depot, whose underground storerooms contain all of the city’s supplies. Lina Mayfleet disappointedly draws Pipeworks Laborer, which means she will repair pipes below the storerooms. Doon Harrow hopes for Electrician’s Helper so he might fix Ember’s electrical problems and save the city, but he draws the job of Messenger and throws his piece of paper in anger. Scolded by the mayor, Doon rants about the state of Ember with its blackouts and supply shortages. Later, in Harken Square, Doon and Lina trade jobs. As Messenger, Lina gets the job she had first wished for, and Doon feels happy because he will have access to Ember’s generator, which creates electricity from an underground river.

Summary: Chapter 2: A Message to the Mayor

Lina runs home, happy about her job, but as she passes unlit streetlamps, feels dread while recalling a rumor about Ember’s dwindling light bulb supply. She also thinks about when she and Doon were young and they tried to climb a light pole. Doon fell and yelled at the others for laughing, and blamed Lina because climbing the pole was her idea. Lina’s Granny and baby sister, Poppy, are her only family now that her parents have died from the coughing sickness ravaging Ember. Their cluttered apartment above Granny’s yarn shop is decorated with Lina’s drawings of a city filled with light, one born from her imagination despite teachings from The Book of the City of Ember that beyond Ember, there’s only darkness. 

Later, Lina starts her job as Messenger, reporting to Captain Fleery and delivering messages for Ember’s citizens. Near Garn Square, she passes a group of Believers singing hopeful songs. Later, she delivers a message from Looper Windley, a young man who walks with a lurch, to Mayor Cole in the Gathering Hall. Portraits of Ember’s mayors, including its seventh—her great-great-grandfather, Podd Morethwart—line the walls. As Assistant Guard Barton Snode fetches the mayor, Lina wanders to the roof, hoping to see into the Unknown Regions, but glimpses only blackness while causing a commotion below. After Chief Guard Redge Stabmark catches Lina, the mayor scolds her for trespassing but, upon receiving her message, smiles strangely and decides not to punish her.

Summary: Chapter 3: Under Ember

Doon begins his new job at the Pipeworks. Donning an old slicker and boots, he descends a deep, damp stairway leading to the Main Tunnel. There, he encounters Ember’s raging underground river for the first time and begins to mentally map the Pipeworks’s vast, labyrinthine layout. At its west edge, he watches the river vanish into a dark opening in a wall. At its east edge, he sees the chasm from which the river surges into the Pipeworks, along with a locked room housing Ember’s generator. 

While patching pipes, Doon also realizes that Ember is in worse shape than he thought, so he determines to get into the locked room. When he does, though, he discovers that his understanding of how the generator works is as limited as that of his coworkers. Later he recognizes an old man from the generator room and asks him how it works. The old man doesn't know either; he says it's just his job to fix it when it breaks. Doon’s despondency turns to anger at home, but his father, Loris, who runs a small shop selling useful items, convinces him to stay vigilant at work and pay close attention to everything he sees. And because Doon is fascinated by bugs, his father recommends he keep an eye out for interesting insects. But Doon regards this as silly. Doon hopes instead that his work in the Pipeworks will lead him to something that will help save the city.

Analysis: The Instructions & Chapters 1–3

The anonymous Builders of Ember create their city in a shroud of secrecy with the intention of protecting its citizens because they understand the overwhelming power of human curiosity. The prologue does not highlight why people must not leave Ember for two centuries, but it seems likely that the Builders employed these secret tactics in order to prevent a premature exodus from Ember, presumably due to their own uncertainty about the state of the world in the future. In the meantime, they provide Ember’s citizens with an environment for living a prescribed life that does not lend itself to curiosity. The Builders’ concern that Ember’s future mayors will be curious, however, leads them to protect the secret in a way that leaves open the possibility that no one will ever learn the truth.

The fact that the children of Ember must enter the workforce at the age of twelve suggests that the Builders created a social structure that values the survival of society over the growth of the individual. A child’s dedication to work is more important than his or her education, because in a closed society it does not serve the greater good for anyone to question their own status or challenge anyone else’s position. The repetitive, unthinking nature of a messenger’s job highlights how little value there is in human labor, and the old man from the generator room’s lack of understanding of the very machine he services highlights how common it is to live an entire life without the need to rely upon one’s own insight.

Next section Chapters 4–6

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