The City of Ember: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Doon starts spending time wandering the Pipeworks. Most workers do their jobs quickly and then play cards, since the jobs themselves aren’t hard. Since the blackout, however, Doon has vowed to not waste any time. He pays attention, like Doon’s father said to do. Doon follows his map for the most part, but he leaves trails of objects for himself when he has to leave the map. Already, he’s found several new bugs. A group of Pipeworks employees caught him with one and teased him a while ago. Doon angrily stood to yell at them, but stepped on his bug. He feels frustrated by his anger and the unintended consequences that accompany it.

Doon hopes to find something interesting, but he doesn’t find much except for lost tools and someone’s lunch. One day, he finds what he assumes is a supply closet. It’s marked “No Entry,” but Doon enters anyway. It’s dark and there’s nothing in it but a locked door on the far wall. Back in the tunnel, Doon discovers a hatch in the ceiling that he assumes goes to the storerooms. He wonders if the Builders used it to move easily from one place to another. On days when Doon works closer to the main tunnel, he walks along the river. He avoids the generator and instead spends time at the river’s end. There are rocks there that almost look like there’s writing on them, but nothing in the Pipeworks seems important.

Doon resigns himself to the fact that he’s never going to understand electricity after seeing the generator. He takes apart an outlet at home, but gets a painful jolt when he does. Later, when he tries to wind wires to mimic what he saw in the wall, nothing happens and he realizes that whatever makes light comes through the wires—it’s not the wires themselves. Not wanting to give up on a moveable light, on Thursday Doon goes to the library to look up fire. The Ember library, run by ancient Edward Pocket, contains two rooms, one of fiction and one of nonfiction. Everything in the library was written by an Ember resident and though things are arranged alphabetically, a book on moths, for instance, could either be under M, B for bugs, or F for flying things. Doon starts in the F section.

Fire usually only occurs in Ember when there’s an accident, so it’s rare. Doon knows that the trick will be to make fire last long enough to go into the Unknown Regions. He finally finds a book on fire, but the author clearly knows little and mostly talks about a fire that destroyed a building. With a sigh, Doon begins pulling volumes randomly off the shelves. This sometimes yields interesting results. Doon reads a book of phrases with unknown origins, such as “hogwash” and “all in the same boat.” Annotations say that no one knows what a hog or a boat is. As Doon puts the book back, Lina walks in.