The Knife of Never Letting Go

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Character Analysis

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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “If There Was a Girl”

Todd asks the girl who she is. In New World, girls were supposed to become women and wives at 13, but the girls had died like the women, killed by the Spackle noise germ.

Todd notices that her clothes are newer than his. The strangest thing, other than her existence, is that Todd can’t hear any Noise from her. He sees that she is frightened at first, but she soon stops shaking and watches him. He takes out the map and studies the arrows pointing up the river. While he’s distracted, she hits him with a stick, prepared to escape. As Todd falls, he swings the knife and cuts her arm. He then bandages her cut with a styptic pack. He tells her his name and then they hear footsteps and Noise. Aaron runs towards them.

Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “The Choices of a Knife”

Aaron pushes Todd against a tree and strangles him. During the previous attack, the crocs ripped off Aaron’s left ear and some of his left cheek. Manchee bites Aaron’s calf. Aaron pulls away and sees that the girl is gone. He asks where the sign is, and then he chases her. Todd doesn’t know what he means. He hears her scream and follows.

Aaron’s Noise imagines the girl as a sacrifice, but exactly what he means is unclear. He knocks the knife out of Todd’s hand and holds his head under the water. Todd hits him with a rock and gets out from under him. The girl has the knife. Todd takes the blade from her. He feels like she wants him to kill Aaron, but he can’t do it. He lets Aaron live, even though he knows they will be safer if he kills him. As they go deeper into the swamp, he feels like a useless coward.

Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “When Luck Ain’t with You”

The girl follows Todd deeper into the swamp. His shame over not killing Aaron is intense. He takes a torch from the rucksack and looks at the journal. The arrows on the map point to another settlement. He shows the girl where he lives on the map, but she doesn’t seem to understand.

Todd follows her into the trees. She’s at a patch of freshly burned forest that has been knocked down. Soon, they find the burned wreckage of a ship. Todd recognizes it because some of the buildings in town are built from the hulls of similar ships.

There are two bodies nearby—a man and a woman. Todd asks if they are her parents. He believes Aaron found her after her parents crashed and died. She doesn’t answer him and goes into the ship.

Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Food and Fire”

She takes out a green box and pushes a button, which ignites an instant campfire. She gives Todd a packet of food, and they leave the ship. Todd doesn’t understand why she shows no emotion about her parents. They walk until it is almost dawn before resting.

When Todd wakes, a huge bird creature called a cassor stands over him. It follows Manchee around. The girl laughs. Todd gives it a block of cheese, but the cassor spits it back onto his face and leaves. The girl lets Todd look ahead with her binoculars. It’s the first time Todd has used the technology.

The girl’s lack of Noise unsettles Todd, as he has no way of knowing what she’s thinking or what she might think of him. Todd realizes that she came from somewhere without the Noise germ. He expresses that if she catches it, it will kill her. He also suspects that just because he can’t hear her Noise doesn’t mean she can’t hear his.

Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Book of No Answers”

The girl runs, wondering if his thoughts about her potential infection could be true. She thinks that if he is right, the germ might kill her. Todd catches her and says he thought there were no more settlements, so maybe he is mistaken about her getting the germ. He flips through the book, looking for clues. He reads poorly and does not understand what looks to him like “You moosed warren them” (108).

The girl rocks until Todd leaves her. He finds her bag and wonders if he should take it back to her. He hears whispers. He searches the trees with the binoculars from her bag. He sees the Mayor and other men on horseback headed towards them.

Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Bridge”

Todd is surprised to see the Mayor, who rarely makes an appearance in town. He could have sent his followers after Todd without joining them. Davy and several of the Mayor’s devoted men ride with him. Aaron walks behind them. Todd doesn’t know why he is important enough to chase. Aaron points in Todd’s direction. As he and the girl run, Todd promises himself that he will kill Aaron if he gets the chance.

He sees a path cut into the opposite riverbank. They reach a bridge. He tries to cut the knots in the cable, but the knife isn’t sharp enough to sever the material. Todd screams at the girl, telling her it’s all her fault. He hits himself in the face to stop his Noise.

She breaks the campfire box on a rock and dumps its gas onto the bridge. She presses a button and throws the box onto the gas, where it combusts in a fireball. The end of the bridge falls as the flames burn it, taking one pursuer, Mr. MacInerny, and his horse with it. The Mayor shouts Todd’s name and says they aren’t done.

Further up the trail, Todd apologizes to the girl, who tells him that her name is Viola.

Part 2 Analysis

Part 2 primarily concerns Viola’s appearance. One of the foundational beliefs of Todd’s existence in Prentisstown was that there were no more women. The Spackle germs had killed them all. This is why he had no mother to raise him. He doesn’t know it yet, but the men in Prentisstown have gone to great lengths to hide the fact that they killed their women.

Todd gets his first chance to kill Aaron, but he can’t do it. This inability, or unwillingness, to kill another man makes Todd feel like a coward. Later, he will learn that killing is how Prentisstown defines manhood. It is literally the passage into adulthood. Every time he chooses not to kill Aaron, he wins an ethical victory, but all he sees in himself is a boy without the courage to kill.

Not killing Aaron is the surest way for Todd to prove that he is not like the others in Prentisstown. Later, he will learn that Aaron wants to be killed, making the ethical considerations trickier. Aaron is already trying to provoke Todd into murdering him, which explains why he pursues him so relentlessly. Aaron believes that his own salvation requires his death at Todd’s hands.

Viola’s silence gives Todd his first exposure to what life was like before the Noise germ. He is unused to calm, which is why Farbranch will seem so different to him later. Viola has a level of privacy that he—and the other males on New World—don’t have. He is accustomed to knowing everything about everyone, or at least, having access to their deceptive, deflecting thoughts. He cannot know more about Viola than what she will share with him, which is the norm in a natural world where people’s thoughts are their own. It is this lack of privacy, wrongfully interpreted, that drove the Prentisstown men to kill their women.

Viola’s appearance also allows the author to give information about the planet and reveal the existence of other worlds. Prentisstown is so devoid of technology that it seems like it is from another age, to say nothing of an age where space travel is possible. Viola came from somewhere much more advanced, and throughout the rest of the story, the author makes it clear that what she will call Old World is analogous to Earth.