All the Light We Cannot See

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Part 2, Chapters 32-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “8 August 1944”

Chapter 32 Summary: “Saint-Malo”

The bombs create a firestorm inside the ancient city. In parts of the city, the flames reach 300 feet into the sky. The Hotel of Bees is destroyed by a bomb.

Chapter 33 Summary: “Number 4 rue Vauborel”

Marie-Laure curls up under her bed, with the little model house in one hand and the stone that fell from it in the other as the bombs rain down on the city. Her ears are assaulted by the noise of the bombs. She smells fire and smoke, as the city burns around her.

Chapter 34 Summary: “Hotel of Bees”

Werner is thrown by the concussion during the bombing. His hearing is destroyed. He tries to gather his wits to check on the radio and his companions in the basement: the engineer Walter Bernd and Frank Volkheimer.

Chapter 35 Summary: “Down Six Flights”

Marie-Laure returns the stone back to the wooden puzzle house, putting the house in her pocket. She descends six flights of stairs, finds half a loaf of bread in the kitchen, and takes it with her into the cellar.

Chapter 36 Summary: “Trapped”

Frank Volkheimer uses his field flashlight to illuminate the basement. The stairwell is gone. The ceiling is lower, but none of the main beams has broken completely. Volkheimer uncovers Bernd. Though Bernd is screaming, Werner cannot hear him. Volkheimer makes his way over to Werner. Werner yells that they have to find another way out; Volkheimer says there is no other way out.

Part 2, Chapters 32-36 Analysis

This part returns to the climactic scene established in the prologue, describing the bombing of Saint-Malo on August 8, 1944, and its aftermath. Marie-Laure endures the bombing itself in her bedroom: however, when the bombing is over and the artillery shelling begins, she goes to the cellar for safety. Werner finds himself trapped in the basement of the Hotel of Bees when the bombing destroys the hotel. The theme of Entrapment and Escape is central to this part of the book, as both protagonists, Marie-Laure and Werner, are trapped in the ruins of the destroyed city. The title of the last chapter in this part, “Trapped,” echoes this theme. This chapter begins with light—a beacon of hope as Werner assesses his situation: “A light emerges, a light not kindled, Werner prays, by his own imagination: an amber beam wandering the dust” (102). The light comes from a flashlight belonging to Werner’s compatriot Volkheimer, who is using it to search for a way out. Werner’s hope that the light is real and not a product of his imagination alludes to the professor’s radio broadcasts, which present all light as essentially imaginary, created by the brain in the absolute darkness of the skull. These broadcasts have portrayed Light as a Source of Hope and as a product of hope, but now Werner’s hope depends on the reality of light. His hope must find some purchase in the material world if he is to escape the cellar.

Marie-Laure, for her part, wishes this altered reality away. When the bombing starts, she curls into a ball under her bed for safety, and when it tapers off, she finds the world transformed: “From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky” (96). The sound is otherworldly, its beauty inseparable from danger. The world has become something else, a place not meant for humans to live in: “Wherever her great-uncle is, could he have survived this? Could anyone? Has she?” (96). Conscious that there are fires burning all around her, she has to remind herself to breathe. “Ce n’est pas la réalite,” she says to herself (97)—“this is not reality.”