Information vs. Knowledge Theme Analysis

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say. About anything.

“Need a poo, Todd.”

“Shut up, Manchee.”

Men lie, and they lie to theirselves worst of all.

Cillian comes running up but before he says anything to us, Ben cuts him off and says, “Don’t think it!”

Ben turns to me. “Don’t you think it neither. You cover it up with yer Noise. You hide it. You hide it as best you can.” And he’s grabbing my shoulders as he’s saying it and squeezing tight enough to make my blood jump even more than it already is.

Ben reaches behind his back and unclasps something. He wriggles it for a second or two before it comes unlatched completely. He hands it to me. It’s his hunting knife, the big ratchety one with the bone handle and the serrated edge that cuts practically everything in the world, the knife I was hoping to get for the birthday when I became a man. It’s still in its belt, so I can wear it myself.

“Take it,” he says. “Take it with you to the swamp. You may need it.”

It’s a girl.

I know what a girl is. Course I do. I seen ’em in the Noise of their fathers in town, mourned like their wives but not nearly so often. I seen ’em in vids, too. Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it’s pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side. They do all the inside-the-house chores, while boys do all the outside. They reach womanhood when they turn thirteen, just like boys reach manhood, and then they’re women and they become wives.

I shove the map back inside, slam the cover shut and throw the book on the ground.

You idiot.

“Stupid effing book!” I say, out loud this time, kicking it into some ferns.

“Viola,” I say again.

She don’t nod this time.

“I’m Todd,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

“It’s why I can read so good,” Hildy calls back to us. “He gets better at hiding, I get better at finding.”

“If they’d told me, Prentisstown would’ve heard it in my Noise and known that I knew. We wouldn’t’ve even got the head start we had.” I glance at her eyes and look away. “I shoulda given it to someone to read and that’s all there is to it. Ben’s a good man.” I lower my voice. “Was.”

“How can you keep saying that?” she asks, her voice finally snappy. “How can you keep saying that he’s a man and you’re not? Just because of some stupid birthday? If you were where I came from you’d already be fourteen and a month!”

There’s a knife-shaped hole all the way thru and out the other side. The knife is so sharp and Aaron must be so strong that it’s hardly ruined the book at all. The pages have a slit running thru them all the way thru the book, my blood and Spackle blood staining the edges just a little, but it’s still readable.

“It won’t work,” says the boy, still outta sight.

Doctor Snow turns to Ben. “And though I do believe you’re just a man out looking for his son, the law’s the law.”

Oh, son, there’s so much wonder in the world. Don’t let no one tell you otherwise. Yes, life has been hard here on New World and I’ll even admit to you here, cuz if I’m going to start out at all it has to be an honest start, I’ll tell you that I was nearly given to despair. Things in the settlement are maybe more complicated than I can quite explain [...] it was hard enough even before I lost yer pa and I nearly gave up.

But I didn’t give up. I didn’t give up cuz of you, my beautiful, beautiful boy, my wondrous son who might make something better of this world, who I promise to raise only with love and hope and who I swear will see this world come good. I swear it.

“Welcome,” says the Mayor, “to New Prentisstown.”