Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The City of Ember, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
Selfishness, Greed, and Corruption
Family and Community
Censorship
Summary
Analysis
A few yards up the path, Doon discovers a framed sign on the wall. It welcomes Ember’s refugees and warns of a several hour climb ahead. It’s from the Builders. Lina says that she knows the Builders who wrote it are dead now, but it makes her feel like the Builders are watching over them. Lina and Doon continue up the wide path. It’s steep and they take turns carrying Poppy, who’s exhausted and cranky. After a few hours, they notice that the tunnel smells different. They round a corner and see faint light ahead. When they reach the end, a lovely smell greets them. Lina, Doon, and Poppy hold hands.
Finding this note from the Builders is proof for Lina and Doon that they weren’t breaking any rules or doing a bad thing by solving this mystery—the Builders wanted them to figure it out and come here. This makes it clear that while the Builders included a great deal of censorship in their plans for Ember, they never intended that censorship to last forever—or for individuals like Mayor Cole to make it even worse.
Themes
There’s no city. Strangely, the land is spacious and lit by a shiny silver circle in a black sky. Soft hairy stuff covers the ground, and Lina points to more tiny lights in the sky. The air is sweet. They all hold their hands out to feel the hair that comes out of the ground, and they hear odd singing sounds. Lina and Doon agree that they’re not afraid. They walk until they reach tall, hard plants with leaves above their heads. They sit down and wonder if there’s a city nearby. Lina suggests that with the lamp in the sky these people might not need lights, but Doon points out that the lamp isn’t enough to grow plants. He doesn’t know what they’ll do if there’s no city and no people. He and Lina are tired of figuring things out.
Lina and Doon have never seen open land before—a city is all they’ve ever known. In this sense, the hilly meadow they find here is the exact opposite of Ember. It functions as a continuation of the river and will connect Lina and Doon to the natural world they’ve never experienced before. It’s also significant that they emerge from the cave at night—coming from Ember, the moonlight doesn’t seem all that bad. In this situation, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Themes
Lina pulls Poppy onto her lap and they sit in silence. After a while, Lina realizes that the silver lamp is moving. A while later, she realizes she can see light getting brighter. Gradually, the edge of the sky turns orange and then bright red. A huge colored orb rises over the land and becomes too bright to look at. Everything is green, and the sky is a clear blue. Lina and Doon cry at the warmth, the beauty, and the light. They point at singing, flying creatures that flit through the trees and Doon notices insects all over the ground. After a while of exploring, they return to the entrance to the path to eat and remember they have the book. They decide to read it out loud.
Seeing the sunrise for the first time is surely an awesome experience for Lina and Doon, having never lived anywhere where light didn’t come from bulbs. Especially when the sky turns blue, Lina must feel like all her dreams have come true. Given Lina’s dreams of a bright city with a blue sky, this suggests that to a degree, the natural world (as represented by the river in Ember) is something intrinsically connected to all humans.
Themes
