All the Light We Cannot See

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Part 11, Chapters 166-167Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 11: “1945”

Chapter 166 Summary: “Berlin”

Content Warning: This section of the book includes a scene of rape, described in the guide.

In January 1945, Jutta and the four other girls remaining in the Children’s House are transported to Berlin with Frau Elena, to work at a machine-parts factory. Berlin is bombed every night through the spring. The Reich falls apart: the mail stops, young boys are shot in the streets as deserters and children are killed by falling bombs. Jutta and the other women work moving rubble from the bombings and clearing the streets.

Jutta receives notice that Werner has been killed.

The Russian army closes in on Berlin and all the women fear what will happen to them when the soldiers arrive. They are raped by three Russian soldiers who find them in the factory. Jutta hears one officer repeating a list of names while he rapes her; she assumes that they are the names of fallen soldiers.

Chapter 167 Summary: “Paris”

Etienne rents the same apartment that Marie-Laure grew up in. They wait daily at the train station, scanning the faces of each arrival, and read the newspapers hoping to see her father’s name. He could be on his way home: he could be long dead. Dr. Geffard, the mollusk expert, waits with them. When Marie-Laure goes to the museum, the staff tell her they are searching everywhere for her father. They continue to help financially with housing and her education. All through the summer they wait, but he never comes. In the fall, Marie-Laure announces that she wants to go to school.

Part 11, Chapters 166-167 Analysis

In Berlin, the suffering of the German people at the end of the war and after the collapse of the Reich highlights the emptiness of the Nazis’ promises of order and prosperity. In Part 7, Werner thought of the German army as displacing entropy outward—as Germany itself became more orderly, the actions of its military were inflicting chaos outside its borders, just as Dr. Hauptmann says that the entropy of any system can only decrease if the entropy of another system increases proportionally. Now, with Germany defeated, entropy comes home. Chaos and brutality are everywhere. The Russian soldier who rapes Jutta recites the names of Russian soldiers killed by Germany, as if punishing her personally for the actions of her country’s military. This conception of “justice” is of course fundamentally unjust and nonsensical: The war has created a climate of brutality in which violence begets violence against anyone and everyone.

In Paris, with the help of Etienne and Dr. Geffard, Marie-Laure tries to maintain her faith that she will be reunited with her father and that she will learn how to be happy again. She remembers Madame Manec’s voice, “You must never stop believing” (493). At the end of Chapter 167—the last before the novel’s timeline vaults 30 years into the future, Etienne asks her what she’d like to do next. “‘School,’ she says. ‘I would like to go to school’” (493). This moment implies that the work of Entrapment and Escape is ongoing for Marie-Laure. Learning has been her means of escape since the beginning—since her father taught her to read braille and to find her way around her neighborhood. Now she must learn to navigate a much larger world and move into a future that, not long ago, she couldn’t be sure she would have. To make any of this possible, she must go to school.

What unites the two cities’ stories is that, after the war, life must go on. However damaged and scarred, peoples’ lives continue, no matter what they have lost.