All the Light We Cannot See

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Part 0, Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 0: “7 August 1944”

Chapter 1 Summary: “Leaflets”

Content Warning: This book depicts antisemitism, war, bullying, and violence, including violence against children, as well as rape and sexual assault. These events are referenced in the guide.

Leaflets fall from the sky over the French seaside city of Saint-Malo, warning inhabitants to depart the city immediately for open country. American bombers are preparing to attack the city’s German occupiers.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Bombers”

American bombers arrive from across the sea, descending as they approach the city.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Girl”

A sightless, 16-year-old girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels in her room in the house at Number 4 rue Vauborel. She has filled two buckets with water, along with the bathtub. She explores a miniature of the city by touch. The drone of airplanes grows louder.

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Boy”

A young German private, Werner, heads for the basement in the hotel where he is stationed—L’hôtel des Abeilles (The Hotel of Bees). The hotel has operated for centuries. Before the war, it was a glamorous destination for vacationing Parisians. It began its life in the 15th century as the home of a wealthy pirate who retired from plundering ships to study bees. There are beautiful carvings and frescoes of bees in various places within the hotel.

Some of Werner’s fellow soldiers fire an anti-aircraft gun is fired from a balcony of the hotel, and the recoil of the enormous weapon reverberates throughout the building.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Saint-Malo”

This ancient walled town is one of the last remaining French towns in German hands; half of Western France is free. Only a few stubborn inhabitants remain, along with the Germans trying to hold onto the city. All citizens head for shelter.

Chapter 6 Summary: “Number 4 rue Vauborel”

Because she is blind, Marie-Laure cannot read the leaflets warning residents to depart, and as such she is one of the last non-Germans still in the city as the bombers close in. By now, she has heard the planes coming and knows she should head for the basement shelter, but instead she finds the model of the house she has been living in for the last four years. She removes the house from the model city, opens it, and a stone drops into her hand.

Chapter 7 Summary: “Cellar”

Werner Pfennig tunes his radio transceiver in the basement. The corner of the basement is reinforced. The staff sergeant, Frank Volkheimer, and the engineer, Walter Bernd, join him. Werner realizes that he forgot to bring any water downstairs with him. The radio reminds Werner of his sister, Jutta.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Bombs Away”

The 12 American bombers release their loads: 480 bombs drop into the city. Etienne LeBlanc watches the bombs from the prison at Fort National; to him they look like a swarm of locusts, a Biblical plague. The bombers fly away unharmed. Marie-Laure hides underneath her bed on the sixth floor of the tall, skinny house. The light goes out in the cellar of the Hotel of Bees. A roaring blast hits the city.

Part 0, Chapters 1-8 Analysis

These chapters introduce the main characters, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig. Marie-Laure, a 16-year-old French citizen, hides in her bedroom in Saint-Malo during the Allied attack on the last German stronghold in Western France. Werner, a German radioman, heads for the bomb shelter in the L’hôtel des Abeilles in Saint-Malo as the American bombs begin to fall. Most of Western France is free and in Allied hands as the attack begins on August 7, 1944.

The settings in this prologue establish the theme of Entrapment and Escape, as both Werner and Marie-Laure find themselves trapped in a city that is about to be bombed. The novel begins in media res—in the middle of things—opening just before the climax of the action before going backward in time in Part 1 to show how the characters arrived in these precarious situations. This narrative technique allows the novel to build maximum suspense at the outset, establishing a sense of direction for the narrative as, in subsequent chapters, the characters are inexorably drawn into the trap that is Saint-Malo on August 7, 1944.

In Chapter 3, “The Girl,” Marie-Laure is introduced as “a sightless sixteen-year-old” kneeling over a model city laid out on a table (5). The model, which replicates the very city she lives in, “contains scale replicas of the hundreds of houses and shops within its walls” (5). This model, too, evokes the theme of entrapment and escape. Marie-Laure’s blindness—which developed in childhood—threatened to be a kind of trap for her, robbing her of her independence and her mobility. Her father, Daniel LeBlanc, painstakingly built this model city to help her learn her way around the real city by feel. This is the second such model city he has built—the first was in Paris, where they lived before the war forced them to flee to Saint-Malo. Through his patience and ingenuity and her perseverance, Marie-Laure has escaped the trap of her disability, learning new ways to navigate the world around her.

On the very first page, the moon is present as leaflets rain down on the city, warning residents to evacuate ahead of the bombers. The moon later emerges as a key symbol of Light as a Source of Hope, and when Werner walks into the moonlight at the end of his life, near the close of the book, it is a symbol of freedom. On this first page, it is “small and yellow and gibbous” (3), suggesting that hope feels very far away in this moment.