Summary of All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr | Summary & Analysis

Instaread Summaries

• Publisher: Instaread, Inc
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781683781646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Fiction historique

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr - A 15-minute Summary & Analysis

Preview of this Instaread:

The lives of two teens, a French girl and a German boy, improbably intersect at the end of World War II in All The Light We Cannot See.

Before the war, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who has been blind since childhood, lives comfortably in Paris with her father, Daniel, who is the key master for the natural history museum. She loves to visit the museum and learn, especially about molluscs, or snails. Her father makes her a detailed wooden replica of their neighborhood so she can learn to navigate it. He also makes complicated wooden puzzle boxes that delight her. He gives her a Braille copy of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and then, after she devours it, the first volume of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Marie-Laure is also fascinated by a story she hears at the museum of a fabulous diamond hidden there, called the…

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Inside this Instaread:

• Summary of entire book
• Introduction to the Important People in the book
• Analysis of the Themes and Author’s Style

About the Author

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Themes

Loss

The theme of loss is a major one in All the Things We Cannot See, which takes such a stark look at war and what it does to people, especially children. Few young people, faced with terror and indoctrination, can separate what they are told is right from what is truly right, as Jutta does, or keep their innocence, as Marie-Laure does. Though Marie-Laure and Jutta are saved, Werner, and Frederick, as well as everything they might have been, are lost. Even Volkheimer, who is forever changed by all he experienced in the war, can be counted as a loss.

This sweeping sense of loss, however, finds balance in its counterpart, as voiced by Madame and embodied by Marie-Laure. That counterpart is the fact that love and goodness will endure. There is no clear answer as to why, and this is another major point of the novel. For some people, such as Madame, it is a matter of faith. For others, such as Daniel and Etienne, both men of science, it is one of the many puzzles that make up life. To solve them is the challenge and joy of living. Puzzles are, in fact, one of the most prevalent images in All the Light We Cannot See, from the wooden puzzle boxes that Daniel makes for his daughter to solve to the very existence of wars and inhumanity. Some of these puzzles have answers, some do not. They may be beyond human understanding, but life goes on. It takes bravery to live life fully, as do Marie-Laure and Madame, and as Etienne learns to do from their example, but it can be done. When Etienne finally agrees to help the resistance, he realizes that he was not living until that moment.

The Disasters of War

In order to really understand these characters, readers must fully grasp the realities of what it was like during World War II in Europe. Anthony Doerr builds up a fully realized portrayal of that terrible time, from the daily awfulness of available food, to the fear of being arrested or killed by a bomb at any time, to the blood-curdling inhumanity of the Schulpforta indoctrination school to, finally, the horrific murders perpetrated by Werner and his team in Eastern Europe. By the time Werner goes to the eastern front, finding a hard-boiled egg to eat becomes almost a holy experiment. In Saint-Malo, Marie-Laure is lucky when she can get some coarse bread. Everywhere people are so hungry that they are eating pets and birds off the street. People run out of fuel, too, and must burn anything they can find, as Marie and Etienne do. At school, Werner muses that they are even running out of boys to fuel the war. Daniel gets picked up by the authorities and disappears. Etienne avoids this same fate only because the war ends. This is the context of daily life in which the story must be placed.

For those in the military, or military schools, the situation is much worse. The game that the teachers lead at Schulpforta, who is the weakest, shows how easily adults can turn children into killers in these conditions. This is reinforced, graphically, when the boys must take turns torturing a near-dead prisoner who is staked out in the schoolyard. That is not enough of an example for these indoctrinators of children. The body of this man, who is explained away as less than human because he is not German, is left out to rot, fodder for carrion crows. By the time Werner goes back to Berlin to see Frederick after he is nearly beaten to death, Werner’s stress is so great that he sees the mannequins in store windows as corpses. This stress grows during his killing missions, as he hallucinates Jutta surrounded by dead babies and a dead little girl coming out of the sky to chase him. Volkheimer, too, though he is older and stronger, is destroyed by his experiences. This is the anguish of those forced to endure the horrors of war, magnified because they are so young. That life goes on become both a miracle and a puzzle.

A Puzzlement

Puzzles, large and small, underline the central message of life as a mystery. Daniel makes elaborate puzzle boxes that Marie-Laure delights in solving. She is also fascinated by the spiraled structure of the nautilus, which is like a puzzle box. The world of the streets around her, in her blindness, is a less delightful puzzle, but she learns bravery as she uses the models of Paris and Saint-Malo to learn to get around by herself. When she gets to Etienne’s house, she finds it constructed like a puzzle, but she knows how to master it. She is ready when she is needed to pick up coded messages at the bakery and bring them home for Etienne to transmit for the resistance. For Werner, science, and especially radio waves, are the puzzles that intrigue him and give him joy when he solves them.

The Sea of Flames diamond and its myth present one of the grand puzzles of the novel. Its very existence is a rumor to all but a few high-ranking museum officials, and it is cleverly hidden by a puzzle-like series of safes, boxes, and locks. There is a myth that the diamond offers its owner immortality while cursing the owner’s loved ones. Daniel does not believe in this myth. For him, everything can be explained by either chance or physics. He has the diamond only briefly, but is arrested and sent to a work camp as soon as he turns it over to Marie-Laure’s keeping, though she does not realize she has it until much later. Before it is thrown into the sea, Daniel dies a prisoner, Madame gets pneumonia and dies, and Etienne is arrested. Marie-Laure, though, miraculously survives the bombardment that destroys Etienne’s house around her, and escapes von Rumpel. Maybe this is a coincidence, but maybe not. Each person must find his or her own answer to the riddle of the stone. A final chapter dedicated to the Sea of Flames suggests that it is waiting on the seafloor for a chance to do more mischief, whether that is through powers of magic or just the power of suggestion is yet another puzzle. The human brain, as Etienne muses, remains the greatest puzzle, creating mazes of good and evil, light and dark. The Sea of Flames conundrum is one of them.

Light and Dark

As the novel’s title implies, along with puzzles, light and dark are important concepts that Doerr uses in their most traditional sense. Light is associated with goodness and darkness with its opposite.

Doerr is careful to explain that Marie-Laure’s world is not a dark one. Though blind, she is still a creature of light. Her other senses, compensating for her blindness, explode into a whorl of colors, sounds and feelings. Her father, who is all things to her, is also all the colors, changing like a kaleidoscope to match what he is doing at the moment, such as red when he is cooking and blue when he is happily tinkering at home. In turn, his love for her feels like an explosion of brightness to Daniel. Madame’s peaches taste like sunlight, and she says that helping the resistance has put the light back in her eyes. Etienne shares in this sentiment, feeling that he can see clearly again when he steps up to help with the resistance. As the radio professors explain to Werner and Jutta, there is no light inside the brain, yet it can construct a world of light. Their theme song for their program appropriately, is “Clair de Lune,” which means light of the moon.

Werner longs for the light, the antithesis of the dark world of the mines in which his father died and a life to which he fears he will be condemned. He imagines himself as a scientist carrying a lantern, a beacon against the darkness, to an observatory where he will watch the light of the stars and solve puzzles of science. As he learns about infrared and ultraviolet from his copy of The Principles of Mechanics, he feels a world of light opening to him. However, the book is confiscated by a Nazi official because a Jew wrote it, shutting down that source of light for Werner.

As is traditional in so many works about World War II, the Nazis bring darkness. Rumor has it they even carry pills that make instant fog. As they approach Paris, they snuff out radio stations as if they were candles, dousing the light of knowledge that freedom of information brings, and then the whole City of Lights goes dark. Pre-war Paris is portrayed as a place of light, beauty, and freedom, especially in Jutta’s imaginings, while Berlin is dark and mechanical. When the Germans come to Saint-Malo, even the fireflies leave, but Madame and Etienne’s transmitter are portrayed as sparks of remaining light. As Germany reels under the Allied bombing, Werner’s school loses electricity, making its darkness even more prominent. Germany is really going dark. When Werner arrives in the east, the day is sunless. Then, as they ride on their killing missions, the young soldiers destroy sunflowers, which is another emblem of light. In contrast, their opposites, the young, liberating American soldiers, are described as bright-eyed, bringing back the light.

At the end, when he is trapped in the cellar in Saint-Malo, Werner is starving in the darkness and thinking of the wrongs he has done. He comes to understand that no darkness is total. There is always a hope of light, yet another illustration of the theme that life will recover and march on, even if not for Werner.

What is Lost

Werner stresses the novel’s important point that so much possibility is lost to war. In World War I, Etienne became a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder after seeing his beloved brother, Henri, killed in battle. The LeBlancs, with their knowledge of radio waves and science, were signalmen. Etienne became a recluse after his brother’s death, anything his scientific mind might have created or taught lost to the outside world. This is even truer for Werner, who might have gone on to invent many wondrous and useful things. Frederick, with his ability to see truths that no one else wants to admit, must hide his eyeglasses, a symbol of his ability to see, from the teachers and students at Schulpforta. With his love of stars and birds, he too might have gone on to do great things, and certainly would have been a remarkable adult with his great empathy for living things. Instead, he is trapped in his damaged brain after being forced to attend Schulpforta because of his parents’ desire to rise to the top of the Nazi pecking order.

Even Volkheimer, the giant of a boy who becomes a killing machine on the eastern front, turns out to have a gentle, music-loving side. He sees through the game the teachers play with the tortured prisoner. He lets Werner get away with not exposing Etienne’s transmitter,...