All the Light We Cannot See

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Part 8, Chapters 121-128Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 8: “9 August 1944”

Chapter 121 Summary: “Fort National”

On the third day of the shelling of Saint-Malo, a stray American shell hits Fort National, where 380 Frenchmen are being held against their will. Nine are killed instantly.

Chapter 122 Summary: “In the Attic”

Marie-Laure has lost track of time and does not know how long she has been in the attic. She hears the German officer moving below her. He has been sleeping in her bed. Next, desperate and beginning to hallucinate from thirst, she has a conversation with her father, in which he reminds her not to make noise, lest the German hear her. As the American shelling of the city begins again, she uses the noise as cover to open the first can. It is green beans, which she devours with pleasure.

Chapter 123 Summary: “The Heads”

Werner crawls through the rubble, attempting to position the radio antenna so it will work. Volkheimer insists that they will be killed if they try to use the grenades to blow open the stairwell. Werner calculates how much more power remains in their batteries: about one more day of light and radio. All their food and water are long gone.

Chapter 124 Summary: “Delirium”

In a morphine-induced haze, von Rumpel tries to puzzle out where the little house might be. He knows that Etienne did not have it when he was arrested and sent to Fort National. He decides that he will search the house one more time.

Chapter 125 Summary: “Water”

Marie-Laure is desperately thirsty. She leaves the attic and climbs through the wardrobe. Two buckets of water are just outside her bedroom on the sixth floor. As she leaves the wardrobe, she imagines her grandfather and Etienne as boys, holding her hands, protecting and guiding her. She drinks her fill while listening to the German ransacking a room several floors below. She fills the bean can with more water, grabs her novel from the floor, and returns to the attic.

Chapter 126 Summary: “The Beams”

Werner and Volkheimer talk about the Prussian forests and the coal country from which they each escaped. Werner would give anything to be there now; a child again listening to his radio.

Chapter 127 Summary: “The Transmitter”

Marie-Laure turns on the radio and raises the antenna. She begins reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea aloud into the microphone.

Chapter 128 Summary: “Voice”

On his fourth day in the basement, Werner hears a young girl reading in French over his radio. Thinking that he is hallucinating, he is content to stay in this happy dream. Suddenly, the girl says that someone is there, right below her and the broadcast cuts off. Werner wants to help her, to save her, but he is helpless and close to death himself.

Part 8, Chapters 121-128 Analysis

In a game of wits and survival, Marie-Laure pits herself against von Rumpel and her own body. To save her sanity and honor her great-uncle and grandfather, she begins reading Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea aloud on the radio. Just as Etienne played his brother’s recordings on the radio, Marie-Laure participates in that family tradition. She has to listen carefully to the ambient noise of the burning city to guess how loudly she can speak without alerting Von Rumpel to her position. Doerr presents this active listening as a means of enlarging her world—another example of the theme of Entrapment and Escape. At this moment—in a ruined building in a burning city, pursued by von Rumpel, Marie-Laure is more trapped than she has ever been. Nonetheless, as she listens to the world outside the window, her world becomes all-encompassing:

Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away […] 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 […] 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 (391).

No visual information goes into this image except that which Marie-Laure draws from memory and imagination. In this way, she is like the professor’s portrayal of the human mind—constructing a light-filled world in darkness. It’s a world that extends almost infinitely across space and time—a mode of imaginative resistance against the forces keeping her body, and those of so many others, trapped in place.

Meanwhile, though he has deduced the correct location of the real Sea of Flames, von Rumpel himself races against time and his cancer to fulfill his obsession and perhaps, if the fairy-tale of the stone’s power is true, save himself. Rendered absurd by his obsession and the proximity of the stone, von Rumpel’s desperation mirrors the last-ditch effort of the Germans to stave off defeat. Only magic can save von Rumpel—and the German army—now.