All the Light We Cannot See

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Part 12, Chapters 168-177Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 12: “1974”

Chapter 168 Summary: “Volkheimer”

Frank Volkheimer, age 51, lives in the outskirts of a city in West Germany, where he works installing and repairing television antennas. He lives alone; he has never married or had children.

A package arrives for him containing three photographs: a soldier’s canvas knapsack, a child’s notebook with the initials W.P. in the corner, and a small wooden house. The authorities hope that Volkheimer can help them identify these belongings so that they can be returned to the soldier’s family. Volkheimer immediately knows whose belongings these are.

Chapter 169 Summary: “Jutta”

Jutta Wette, now married with a six-year-old son named Max, teaches high-school algebra. Her husband, Albert, is kind and patient, with a passion for running his electric train set in the basement.

Volkheimer arrives to return Werner’s belongings to Jutta. She never allows herself to think about the war, particularly the end of the war, nor about Werner. She does not believe that anything can be healed. Volkheimer explains that he was with Werner in school and in the field and that the last place they were together was in Saint-Malo, France.

Volkheimer is kind to Max and teaches him how to make a paper airplane that flies.

Chapter 170 Summary: “Duffel”

Jutta cannot bear to look in the duffel, but eventually that night, after Max is in bed and Volkheimer has gone, she does. She finds the notebook that she sent to Werner, filled with plans for inventions and questions he longs to answer. Inside the notebook, she also finds a letter addressed to Frederick. She remembers Frederick was Werner’s friend from school.

Chapter 171 Summary: “Saint-Malo”

Jutta takes Max to Saint-Malo during their summer vacation. Though Jutta is afraid that people will be mean to her in France, because she is German, no one says anything to her about her accent or about Max speaking German.

They arrive in Saint-Malo and go to the sea. They visit all the tourist attractions. Eventually, Jutta takes the model house to one of the curators of the war museum. He takes her right to the front door of Number 4 rue Vauborel. He tells her that the LeBlanc family lived there during the war. When asked about a girl, the man replies that a blind girl lived there until just after the war ended. He finds her address for Jutta. Max discovers that the house is really a puzzle.

Chapter 172 Summary: “Laboratory”

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a professor in the Natural History Museum in Paris, where she manages a small laboratory, studying mollusks. She has a daughter, Hélène, who is 19 years old. Hélène’s father is a Canadian named John. Though they never married, Marie-Laure and John remain friendly, and the three of them eat dinner together every Friday.

Her assistant comes in one evening in July. A woman with white blond hair and a little boy have gotten her address from Brittany; they want to see her about a model house.

Chapter 173 Summary: “Visitor”

Jutta introduces herself and Max to Marie-Laure. Marie-Laure’s assistant gives Max a tour of the museum. Jutta gives Marie-Laure the model house and Marie-Laure explains that her father made the house; she wonders whether Werner opened it. Mentally, she lists the three times that Werner saved her life: by not exposing Etienne, by saving her from von Rumpel, and by helping her escape the city. Jutta tells her that Werner is dead.

Marie-Laure explains that she and Werner talked about Jutta and Werner listening to the recordings made by her great-uncle as children. She offers to send Jutta the last remaining record, about the light of the moon. Jutta leaves the model house with Marie-Laure.

Chapter 174 Summary: “Paper Airplane”

After returning to their hotel, Max folds a paper airplane while telling his mother all about what he saw in the museum. Jutta calls her husband on the telephone.

Chapter 175 Summary: “The Key”

When Marie-Laure summons the courage to open the little puzzle house, the iron key to the grotto drops into her hand.

Chapter 176 Summary: “Sea of Flames”

The Sea of Flames rests in the grotto, covered over with barnacles and algae.

Chapter 177 Summary: “Frederick”

Frederick and his mother live in an average apartment in a block of apartment houses. Their patio looks out onto a grocery store parking lot bordered by a few trees. Frederick sits and draws endless spirals, all day long.

One day, a letter comes for Frederick, forwarded through the veteran’s affairs offices, first to Volkheimer, then to Jutta, and, finally, to Frederick. Inside the envelope is an older envelope with Frederick’s name handwritten on the outside. It contains two bird prints. Frederick’s mother remembers his bird books and his interest in birds. She remembers Werner too: a small boy with white blond hair and a beautiful smile. He was Frederick’s only friend. Frederick seems to pay no attention to the bird print when she puts it in front of him.

As they sit outside on the patio after dark, an owl lands nearby and looks at them. Frederick sits up and appears to look at the owl. Then the owl flies away. Frederick returns briefly to the world and asks his mother: what are we doing?

Part 12, Chapters 168-177 Analysis

These chapters, which take place nearly 30 years after the end of the war, show how the unhealed memories of war still shadow the lives of all who survived it. Though they have lived full lives and appear to have gone on, no one has survived unscathed. Volkheimer is living a quiet, isolated life as a television repairman in suburban Pforzheim, West Germany. Though he survived the war while Werner died, the contrast between their fates encapsulates the theme of Entrapment and Escape. It is Werner who has escaped, walking out of the POW camp into the moonlight, while Volkheimer—30 years later—remains trapped in his memories of violence: “the eyes of men who are about to die haunt him, and he kills them all over again. Dead man in Lodz. Dead man in Lublin. Dead man in Radom. Dead man in Cracow” (498). The repetition of this phrase, with only the locations changed, suggests the insistence of these memories and the psychological toll it took on Volkheimer to commit so much violence against people he didn’t even know.

The meeting between Jutta and Marie-Laure in “Visitor” echoes the earlier meeting between Marie-Laure and Werner: This is another moment in which the novel’s twin storylines come together, and Jutta’s slight difficulty communicating in French illustrates the effort involved in bridging the distance between these worlds: “‘It was not,’ says Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, ‘very easy to be good then’” (515). This reference to her brother—simplified by the limitations of language—encapsulates Werner’s life. Jutta remembers him as a sensitive, empathetic boy who would never have wished to harm anyone, but she understands that circumstances did not allow him to remain that way without paying a high price for it. Frederick was willing to pay that price, but Werner was not—until the end of his life.

Jutta’s son Max is like a reincarnation of Werner—offering the chance to see what Werner might have been like if he had lived in a better time. Like Werner, he is bright and curious, observant, and constantly remarking on the things that he notices about the world. He is six years old in 1974, and his favorite thing to do is build paper airplanes. The airplanes function in this section as a symbol of freedom. In “Jutta,” he and Volkheimer build paper airplanes together: “Soon enough, they each have a wide-winged plane with a long-forked tail. Volkhemer’s sails neatly across the yard, flying straight and true, and smacks into the fence nose-first. Max claps” (504). This brief flight suggests a moment of Lost and Redeemed Humanity for Volkheimer. Despite his nightmares, he shares this moment of tenderness with Max, and the “straight and true” flight of the airplane represents the flight of his spirit, briefly free until it smacks into the fence of his guilt and his bad memories.