Number the Stars — Chapter 9

About This Passage

This passage was chosen because it captures the chapter's quietest and most consequential moral choice — Annemarie deciding, in the space of a single thought, to do for Ellen what Mama has just done for her. Lowry stages the decision interiorly, in two short sentences with an emphatic 'But she didn't,' so the reader registers that growing up has just happened in the silence between two paragraphs.

Narration Prompt

Trace the chapter's two settings — the barn at dusk where Annemarie confronts Uncle Henrik, and the candlelit living room where the staged wake gathers. Be sure to include Henrik's lesson about bravery, Annemarie's silent decision to keep the secret from Ellen, the arrival of the strangers, the moment Henrik blows out the candles, and the closing image of Ellen carried in by her father.

Discussion Questions

1. Uncle Henrik tells Annemarie, 'it is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything... We know only what we need to know.' Examine the text's argument about partial knowledge as a form of courage. What does Lowry imply by having a grown man, milking a cow, explain to a child that he himself has been deliberately kept ignorant of parts of the operation? Is the rule of selective knowing being presented as a survival tactic, a moral discipline, or both — and on what evidence in the chapter would you build your reading?
2. When Annemarie remembers that, on the day the soldier stopped her in the street, 'she had not known everything... If she had known everything, it would not have been so easy to be brave,' Lowry threads chapter five back into chapter nine. Examine how the novel uses retrospective recognition to teach its protagonist. What does the text reveal about Lowry's view of how children acquire understanding — slowly, with a delay, as past actions reorganize themselves in the light of new information?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide