All the Light We Cannot See

“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

This quotation from the mysterious science broadcast illuminates the title of the novel and the theme of Light as a Source of Hope. Since all light is invisible, it takes an effort of the imagination to see it.

“‘You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.’”

Herr Siedler, manager of the mines and owner of a beautiful Philco radio, tells Werner the real state of the world. Werner accepts this version of the world for a large portion of the novel. When he returns home from Herr Siedler’s mansion, he destroys his own shortwave radio—seeing it as a mark of his poverty and thus his vulnerability—and begins to accept his role in the Reich.

“Is it right […] to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”

After listening to news of the German invasion of Paris, Jutta questions the actions of the Third Reich. In this quotation, she specifically questions Werner’s decision to attend the national school at Schulpforta. Even though she is just 12 years old, Jutta is Werner’s conscience, reminding him of the dark forces with which he is aligning himself.

“This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear—all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.”

Marie-Laure learns that Etienne’s agoraphobia and anxiety derive from his terrifying war experience as a radio signalman in the trenches. Though light is a symbol of hope throughout the novel, it can also be a source of danger—exposing those who need to stay hidden.

“There is pride, too, though—pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane. The drain moans; the cluttered house crowds in close.”

The night before he leaves for Paris, Daniel LeBlanc marvels at his daughter and his own part in raising her. In the chaos of the war, he has very little control over his own destiny, but his love for his daughter gives him purpose and a sense of power.

“Your problem, Werner, […] is that you still believe you own your life.”

Frederick often seems much older than Werner, as in this quotation. His position at Schulpforta helps his family, and therefore he believes that his life does not belong only to him. He is obliged to do what his family wishes, despite what he might want to do with his own life. Werner is surprised, assuming that Frederick’s family’s wealth and position would somehow protect him from the dangers that plague Werner’s own life.

“Frederick pours his water onto the ground. ‘I will not,’ he says.”

Werner watches Frederick refuse to participate in the torture of a prisoner. Despite what he has said about not owning his life, Frederick has exercised a degree of agency that Werner cannot yet access. Despite his extreme vulnerability, Frederick’s willingness to accept the consequences of his actions makes him free, while Werner remains trapped.

“Madame Manec says, ‘Don’t you want to be alive before you die?’”

Madame Manec challenges Etienne when he attempts to discourage her from participating in the resistance. Like Frederick, Madame Manec believes that “being alive” means acting according to one’s own sense of moral rightness, not being motivated by fear. Her words have a profound effect on Marie-Laure, who overhears their argument. Marie-Laure wants to truly be alive. In fact, this idea becomes a guiding principle of her life.

“For Werner, doubts turn up regularly. Racial purity, political purity—Bastian speaks to a horror of any type of corruption, and yet, in the dead of night, Werner wonders, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it.”

Werner loses his enthusiasm for the Reich as the war continues and his training at school becomes increasingly cruel. After Frederick’s terrible beating, Werner can no longer pretend to himself that the system that he is supporting is good or just in any way. Disillusioned, and once again an outsider, Werner is trapped in his role. All of his life seems corrupted.

“After she has gone back to sleep, after Etienne has blown out his candle, he kneels for a long time beside his bed. The bony figure of Death rides the streets below, stopping his mount now and then to peer into windows. Horns of fire on his head and smoke leaking from his nostrils and, in his skeletal hands, a list newly charged with addresses. Gazing first at the crew of officers unloading from their limousines into the chateau.

Then at the flowing rooms of the perfumer Claude Levitte.

Then at the dark tall house of Etienne LeBlanc.

Pass us by, Horseman. Pass this house by.”

Etienne imagines the dangers he faces, particularly in light of his new work in the resistance. After Madame Manec’s death, Etienne understands that he must continue her work in order to honor her and to retain his own self-respect. Accepting that death is always close by, he is no longer afraid.

“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”

Marie-Laure huddles inside her attic, losing track of the days, as she attempts to outwait and outwit the German officer who has entered the house. This quotation expresses the fluid nature of time and the profound disruptions war causes in people’s daily lives. Many characters share a fragile grasp of reality, including Etienne. Marie-Laure here shares her understanding of how easy it is to lose track of reality.

“I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

This statement from Marie-Laure, spoken in an imagined conversation with her father, echoes what she has learned from Madame Manec. Nothing—not even the legendary Sea of Flames—can guarantee anyone’s survival. Given that she has not yet died, the question is what good she can do with however much life remains to her.

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.”

Marie-Laure prepares to read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea over her great-uncle’s radio. This quotation epitomizes the theme of Entrapment and Escape. At this moment—hiding from von Rumpel in a house that could collapse at any moment—Marie-Laure is as physically trapped as she has ever been, and yet her imaginative picture of the world around her is boundless, extending almost infinitely in both space and time. This quotation also represents the interconnectedness of all life, and the constant intertwining of life and death. Though a young person, Marie-Laure is acutely aware of this cycle of life and death, and her place in it.

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”

Werner describes the ocean near Saint-Malo in a letter to his sister. It is the first time he has seen it. Just as Marie-Laure is drawn to the sea and its creatures, Werner finds beauty and freedom in the sea. At this point, haunted by the little girl killed in Vienna and his own culpability in the German war machine, Werner seeks redemption. He finds the beauty and immensity of the ocean soothing, which allows him to put his human problems into perspective.

“A half dozen more words flutter though Werner in that Breton accent […] memory coming at Werner like a six-car train out of the darkness, the quality of the transmission and the tenor of the voice matching in every respect the broadcasts of the Frenchman he used to hear, and then a piano plays three single notes, followed by a pair, the chords rising peacefully, each a candle leading deeper into a forest. […] The recognition is immediate. It is as if he has been drowning for as long as he can remember and somebody has fetched him up for air.”

Werner finds Etienne’s broadcast in August 1944, but memories immediately take him back to his childhood, sharing the headphones with Jutta to listen to science broadcasts. The comfort associated with this voice brings Werner back to himself, and the sense of himself as a person with a character and value apart from his role in the war. His identity reasserts itself after the war’s long assault.

“Now the piano makes a long, familiar run, the pianist playing difference scales with each hand—what sounds like three hands, four—the harmonies like steadily thickening pearls on a strand and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.”

Listening to “Claire de Lune,” Werner knows he can never turn the Frenchman in. He cannot destroy the life of the man who gave him so much hope and awoke him to the possibility of a better life. He cannot bear to destroy yet another beautiful thing, particularly in the service of a cause he no longer believes in.

“She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.”

As Werner watches Marie-Laure walk to the bakery, he is immediately struck by her independence and joy.

“How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of a second? The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in a fathomless darkness.”

Marie-Laure, trapped by Von Rumpel in the grotto, imagines that her current agony and fear is nothing in the scheme of all time. The image of life as a spark of light in darkness also echoes the theme of Light as a Source of Hope. In the context of the war, individual lives can easily appear insignificant and meaningless. Marie-Laure has learned to believe in the value of that “quick-fading spark.”

“They said what he needed was certainty. Purpose. Clarity. That pigeon-chested commandant Bastian, with his grandmother’s walk; he said they would strip the hesitation out of him.

We are a volley of bullets, we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the sword.

Who is the weakest?”

Werner heads for Number 4 rue Vauborel to rescue the girl. He remembers the dehumanizing ideology taught to him at Schulpforta, and he hopes he can use that training now to reclaim his lost humanity.

“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”

Werner faces von Rumpel. With von Rumpel’s pistol aimed at him, he lunges for Volkheimer’s rifle, knowing that this is a defining moment in his life.

“‘When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?’

He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

From Marie-Laure’s perspective, there is nothing especially brave about the way she lives. Echoing Madame Manec, she points out that she simply does what she must. Werner’s response indicates that he believes he has avoided doing what he must do—until today.

“He thinks of the old broken miners he'd see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”

Watching Marie-Laure, Werner appreciates his life for the moment. Significantly, Werner also associates life with light in this quotation. His understanding of what it means to “protect” his life has changed. Previously, he felt he was protecting his life by doing whatever he could to stay alive. Now, he understands that to protect his life is to use it well.

“Maybe he drops the diamond into the pool among the thousands of snails. Then he closes the puzzle box and locks the gate and trots away.

Or he puts the stone back into the house.

Or slips it into his pocket.

From her memory, Dr. Geffard whispers: That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

After Jutta returns the little model house to Marie-Laure, she ponders what Werner did with the diamond. Wanting to believe that Werner’s heart was essentially good, because he had saved her life, Marie-Laure hesitates to open the puzzle box. When she does, she realizes that her trust and belief in Werner were not in vain; the iron key to the grotto’s gate drops into her hand.