All the Light We Cannot See

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Part 6, Chapters 96-100Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 6: “8 August 1944”

Chapter 96 Summary: “Someone in the House”

Marie-Laure freezes as she realizes that someone is moving about downstairs. She notices that the person walks with a limp: It is the German sergeant major who cornered her in the grotto. She takes her things—the small house containing the stone, her two cans of food, a knife, a brick, and her cane—and retreats to the attic whose entrance is hidden behind the wardrobe.

Chapter 97 Summary: “The Death of Walter Bernd”

The engineer Walter Bernd dies, and Volkheimer buries him in a corner under piled rubble. Werner works on the radio; although the transceiver is broken beyond repair, he might be able to fix the radio receiver. Focused on the task before him, Werner does not despair or think about his situation.

Chapter 98 Summary: “Sixth-floor Bedroom”

Von Rumpel finds the model of Saint-Malo in Marie-Laure’s room. He believes the stone will be hidden inside the model.

Chapter 99 Summary: “Making the Radio”

Just as he did as a child, Werner makes a radio out of broken and scavenged parts. At last, he hears static.

Chapter 100 Summary: “In the Attic”

In her hiding place on the other side of the false panel of the wardrobe, Marie-Laure hears the German officer leave the room. Imagining him pointing a pistol at her back, she climbs the ladder into the attic and spreads a coat across the floor to muffle the sound of her footsteps. She knows why the German is there and she understands that he is still in the house. He will not leave.

Part 6, Chapters 96-100 Analysis

These chapters continue the theme of entrapment. Werner is trapped in the basement as the engineer dies. To take his mind off his seemingly hopeless situation, he attempts to fix the radio. His first radio was a source of hope to him, a way to access a world of knowledge beyond Germany, a promise that he could grow up to make important discoveries of his own. Now, working on the radio offers relief from the fear he is feeling. This is another small drama of Entrapment and Escape. Though he cannot yet physically escape the cellar, he can escape the prison of his fear by turning to the work that has sustained him in the past: “Antenna. Tuner. Capacitor. His mind, while he works, is almost quiet, almost calm. This is an act of memory” (307). This “act of memory”—muscle memory as much as intellectual and emotional memory—he can forget everything else for the moment.

Meanwhile, Marie-Laure is trapped in her house as the German von Rumpel arrives in pursuit of the Sea of Flames. Marie-Laure has the stone in her pocket, hidden inside the model of Etienne’s house. Von Rumpel is also trapped, within his failing body and within his adoration of the Reich and his single-minded pursuit of riches for his superiors. He has been given a few months to live, and the only thing he can think to do in that time is continue doing what he has done all along: obsessively hunting for valuables he can steal on behalf of the authoritarian regime he serves. Even the Sea of Flames, according to the legend, is trapped—hidden away for centuries behind a series of locked doors, cursing whoever touches it because it longs to return to the sea. Before long, Marie-Laure will find a way to give the stone what it wants, hiding it in the grotto where the tide can reach it every day.