In The City of Ember, the name of the city, Ember, symbolizes the potential to something more vast. The Builders, in the prologue, insinuate information that a calamitous event will occur and they must stay underground “for at least two hundred years”(1). Ember only has enough supplies to last about two hundred years, implying that the city was supposed to purse the Instructions and leave Ember by then. However, the greed of the seventh mayor lead to a reckless behavior to disregard the instructions given to him by the previous mayor. A bleak darkness bounds the people of Ember with a sense of disaster and doom, but despite the blackness throughout, Doon and Lina still gleam as though an ember illuminates the black. Fearless, they work hard
