Anthony Doerr's Novel 'All The Light We Cannot See'

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Anthony Doerr uses varying perspectives in his novel All the Light we Cannot See to convey how different characters are affected by World War II. Doerr focuses on 2 character’s perspectives in his novel. He centers his story around Werner, an intelligent boy enlisted into a Nazi training camp and later sent onto the battlefield, and Marie-Laure, a blind girl with a passion for knowledge. Werner’s perspective is focused on fear, which leads to his perpetual need to focus on his survival. Similar to this, Marie-Laure uses her hopeful perspective to create a false reality in her mind. Doerr uses different perspectives to show how focusing too much on one point of view can obscure reality and make a person blind to the truth of some situations. …show more content…
When Werner opens up his mind to love, he finds the strength to help Marie-Laure evade Von Rumpel. This loving perspective finally makes him do things in other people's interest, rather than his own, like keeping the Sea of Flames in the ocean, as Marie-Laure clearly wanted. Not only does Werner progress as a character when he opens his perspective, but so does Marie-Laure. When she she meets Werner, she realizes the reality of the situation she’s in, and how while being hopeful is okay, sometimes she needs to rely on her knowledge to fix situations, and not just hope that they will go away on their own. She finally relies on only herself to live in the world and is able to successfully start a family later on. Doerr uses Werner and Marie-Laure’s perspective not only to provide insight about the hardships of the war for different people, but also to show that opening up the point of view can help oneself understand situations more and can help other people cope with other things that may be plaguing them. The motif of blindness is used as a metaphor to humanity. Marie-Laure and Werner’s ignorance to love and independence are representative of the unconsciousness of the human race to many things today. Ignorance to reality can only be relieved when it is brought to the light of a person’s
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