Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See

Words: 1612
Pages: 7

“The truth is what we see, and honesty is what we use to describe it. Deception saw something different, and denial didn’t see a thing.” - Anonymous. That is to say, a novel that focuses on this ideology of truth is Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the Light We Cannot See. From the perspectives of two young children, Werner from Germany and Marie-Laure from France, readers get a glimpse of day-to-day life during a childhood in WW2. In this story, it is important to note how the Nazi Party puppetized millions of lives in an experiment. In a similar manner, while an intelligent, blond, blue-eyed, tall German boy named Werner was being recruited to the Hitler Youth, a French girl by the name of Marie-Laure was fleeing for her life from Paris, and one that she couldn’t even see as she was …show more content…
The ocean is one of her favorite places as it fuels those curious senses. Indeed, Marie-Laure loves the “beach days” she has with Madame Manec, she thinks to herself, “A months-old knot inside Marie-Laure begins to loosen. She imagines a walled city behind her, its soaring ramparts, its puzzle of streets. All of it suddenly looks as small as Papa’s model. But what surrounds the model is not something her father conveyed to her; what’s beyond the model is the most compelling thing,” (Doerr 232). From this, the readers can infer that Marie-Laure has moral role models, like Madame Manec, Uncle Etienne, and her father. She is given proper guidance with her childish innocence, she isn’t told what’s going on, but only imagines as she naturally should. Focusing on Marie-Laure’s earlier life before moving out of Paris, her father was a museum key-holder, so often that’s where Marie-Laure explores. She loves to feel her way around, so much so that she gets attention. Specifically, many kids pose questions about her and her blindness, but they ask as if it is an unfortunate and bad trait she’s missing out