All the Light We Cannot See

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Part 13, Chapter 178Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 13: “2014”

Chapter 178 Summary

Marie-Laure’s grandson, Michel, who is nearly 12 years old, escorts her to the gazebo at the top of a nearby park. Now 86 years old, Marie-Laure marvels at the ways in which the world has changed, and the ways in which electronic communication has changed the world and shaped people’s lives. She imagines the souls of all those she has lost flying around just like those invisible electronic messages; still present if one could only hear them. She realizes that the world loses people for whom the war is a memory every day, but they rise again as grass, flowers, and songs.

Part 13, Chapter 178 Analysis

Part 13 consists of a single chapter, in which Marie-Laure LeBlanc, now 86, walks through Paris’s Jardin des Plantes with her grandson, Michel. The year is 2014, the same year in which the novel was published. As Michel plays a portable video game, Marie-Laure she thinks about how technology has made possible a level of communication and connection far beyond what Etienne could accomplish with his transistor radio:

Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived—maybe a million times more (529).

This reverie establishes a continuity between past and present—the same electromagnetic waves, the invisible light, that gave her hope in the darkest days of the war are present now, only more so. This instant, global communication, however mundane most of it is—consisting of “appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads” (529)—strikes her as so miraculous that it takes only a slight imaginative leap to become spiritual:

And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? (529).

Communication technology has enabled a kind of immortality, “the air a library and record of every life lived” (529). This is the novel’s final, grandest expression of Light as a Source of Hope. In the war, human lives were treated as if they had no value. For Marie-Laure, Etienne, Jutta, and Werner, the radio was a means of insisting that seemingly insignificant individual lives did matter. In the miraculous future Marie-Laure has lived to see, the air itself cherishes them and holds them in the form of invisible waves of light that penetrate the body, “slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs” (529), even if they are unseen, unfelt, and unheard.