94 pages • 3 hours read
Emily St. John MandelStation Eleven
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 8: “The Prophet”
Chapter 48 Summary
Kirsten and August wake up early on the third day of their separation from the Symphony. After bathing, they pass through Severn City as quietly as possible. They hear a dog bark and hide. Sayid appears, bloody and disheveled, followed by two men and a boy, who are armed. Kirsten throws a knife and August shoots an arrow, immediately killing one of the men and incapacitating the other; the boy runs away. As the second man dies, he explains that the prophet wanted to exchange the captives for Eleanor.
Sayid warns that the prophet is close by. He explains that the prophet captured him and Dieter with a chloroform-like substance. When Dieter died after failing to wake up, the prophet’s men captured Sidney, who later escaped.
Chapter 49 Summary
Sidney, the Symphony’s clarinetist, was studying theater and music in college at the time of the collapse. A fan of modern German drama, she is disappointed that the Symphony only performs Shakespeare.
A year before her capture by the prophet’s men, she starts writing a play but gets stuck on the opening line about going to “rest in the forest,” which some interpret as a suicide note after her disappearance (289). Following her capture, she wakes up in a clearing near Sayid, her hands and feet tied, and overhears the prophet planning to apprehend the Symphony en route to Severn City. Later, when their captors are asleep, Sayid distracts the boy on watch, while Sidney loosens the ropes on her feet. Once her legs are free, she silently escapes, meets the Symphony’s scouts, and warns them to change their route, just as it begins to rain.
Chapter 50 Summary
Kirsten’s two knife tattoos represent people she killed. She killed the first when she was 15, shortly after joining the Symphony, when a man tried to rape her. Two years later, she killed again when a group of men attempted to take food, animals, and a woman from the Symphony by force.
Kirsten, August, and Sayid approach the airport. Hearing a dog bark, they hide in the woods. As the prophet and his men pass by, the prophet’s dog, Luli, stops. The men spot Kirsten and take aim. The prophet addresses her as Titania. Kirsten recognizes the boy with the machete, now carrying a handgun, as the sentry who asked to come with the Symphony. The prophet speaks, quoting lines about living in a fallen world from “Station Eleven”; Kirsten continues the quotation with a passage about wanting to return home. As the prophet prepares to shoot Kirsten, the boy shoots him. In the moment of confusion that follows, August shoots the prophet’s men and the boy kills himself. Moments later, the Symphony’s scouts arrive.Hearasdf
Kirsten finds a page from “Station Eleven” that depicts Dr. Eleven taking command following the death of his mentor, folded into the prophet’s Bible.
Chapter 51 Summary
Kirsten, August, Sayid, and Luli, arrive at the airport, where they are immediately recognized by Charlie. Kirsten visits Charlie in her tent. They recall an experience they shared several years earlier while ransacking a house. Kirsten found Charlie in a child’s room, entranced by a tea set for dolls that was set out perfectly, with no dust on it, even though everything in the house was disordered; Kirsten could see from the lack of footprints that Charlie did not arrange the tea set herself, and she had the feeling that someone was watching them. Remembering the moment together at the airport, they discredit the possibility of ghosts.
That evening August, Charlie, and Jeremy perform music. Wandering away from the concert, Kirsten runs into Clark, who invites her up into the airport’s control tower. Using a telescope, he shows Kirsten a community, far to the south, that recently lit up with electricity.
Chapter 52 Summary
Charlie and August tell Sayid, who is resting, about the concert. The Symphony arrives at the airport.
Far to the south, Jeevan bakes bread for his wife and children, including his son Frank.
Part 8 Analysis
The prophet’s death serves as the climax to the novel and is an example of poetic justice: a boy under from his own group kills him, after demonstrating on multiple occasions that he is uneasy with the prophet’s message and methods. The boy’s decision is apparently spontaneous, and he kills himself afterwards, perhaps fearing retribution or else torn by guilt. His actions demonstrate that those who oppress others put themselves at risk of retaliation.
When Kirsten and the prophet quote “Station Eleven” to one another, they make explicit what has been implied all along: that the series has become, for each of them, a metaphor for the life they now live. The prophet’s inclusion of an excerpt in the Bible he carries elevates “Station Eleven” to scriptural status. Kirsten and the prophet differ in where they place their interpretive sympathies: while the prophet quotes lines that represent Dr. Eleven’s outlook, Kirsten quotes lines sympathetic to those that live in the Undersea.
Kirsten and Charlie’s seemingly supernatural experience with the tea set can never be fully explained or resolved. It emphasizes the almost magical aura that some artifacts from the past hold, however mundane they once were. In addition, the sight of lights on the horizon conjures a similar sense of awe.
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