The City of Ember

While both Doon and Lina are protagonists in The City of Ember and both share in the quest for egress from their doomed home, Lina’s character offers more perspective on the setting and conflict because more of the story is told from her third-person limited narrative than Doon’s. At 12, Lina is thin and lithe, and she loves to run. She has a natural thirst for activity and excitement, which prompts her desire for the job of messenger. Lina lives in an apartment over her grandmother’s yarn shop with only Granny and her baby sister Poppy; Lina’s father died of a “coughing sickness” that afflicted many in Ember, and her mother died in childbirth having Poppy. Lina shows she is well-suited to the messenger job by running fast and delivering many messages in a day. She also shows she is precocious and curious with her impulsive exploration of the Gathering Hall and her impromptu dance on the roof. Lina has a strong imagination and compulsively draws another imagined city, foreshadowing her eventual egress from Ember. She submits to a slightly greedy urge to buy overpriced colored pencils from Looper for a tiny pleasure in her life; in another moment of bold foreshadowing, Lina chooses blue for the sky over her imagined city, and the sight arrests her: “Wouldn’t it be strange, she thought, to have a blue sky? But she liked the way it looked.