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For thousands of years humans have had conflicts ranging from the Hundred Years war to World War II. Every set of conflicts we have seen over the course of history has brought new challenges and obstacles for those trying to survive but there is one thing that has remained constant, we must become mentally and physically stronger if we want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Throughout All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr proves that in times of conflict one must undergo change in order to survive. The book tells the story of two young people growing up during the war and the obstacles they face in order to navigate a war torn Germany and France. The first main character is named Marie-Laure, she is a young blind girl living with her father in Paris. Eventually she and her father have to flee Paris to escape the impending German invasion. They go to a small oceanside town, Saint Malo, where Marie-Laure’s great uncle Etienne, who has extreme PTSD, lives with his maid and good friend Madame Manec. Over the course of her stay in Saint Malo, Marie-Laure’s father get arrested because the germans think he is helping the french fight the them and Madame Manec dies of pneumonia, leaving Marie-Laure and her …show more content…
uncle in their large mansion during the German invasion of Saint Malo. They aid the resistance by using Etienne’s hidden homemade radio transmitter to broadcast much needed information to French and American troops putting both of lives at risk. Meanwhile the other main character Werner Pfennig is growing up in Germany.
We first meet him while he is living in an orphanage with his younger sister Jutta. Werner is very intelligent and has a love for science and engineering so when he finds a broken radio he decides to fix it. His intelligence is recognized by a german official and he gets recommended to go to a nazi school in Schulpforta. Here he learns to use math and radios to find enemy broadcasts and is sent into the war to do so. His story collides with Marie-Laure’s when he is sent to Saint Malo and hears Marie-Laure using Etienne’s radio transmitter to call for help. Werner is able to find her and bring her to safety before his untimely death caused by stepping on a
landmine. At the beginning of the book Werner leaves his home,the orphanage in Zollverein, in hopes of getting a better education and escaping his fate of working and dying in the coal mines where all boys must work at once they turn fifteen. Before leaving Werner and Jutta have a conversation about Werner leaving (Werner) “I know you’re angry-” “You’ll become just like Hans and Heribert” “I won’t” “Spend enough time with boys like that and you will” “So you want me to stay? Go down in the mines?” (Doerr 133). Werner knows that leaving will jeopardize his relationship with Jutta but he knows he must leave if he wants to survive. Though it is terrifying to leave everything he knows and go to a new place it is a sacrifice Werner must make if he wants to opportunity to become an engineer like he has always hoped. He mentions his hopes of a brighter future for him and Jutta in the same conversation “But maybe I’ll learn something; maybe they’ll teach me to be a proper engineer.”(Doerr, 133). If he didn’t make the choice to leave he would have been doomed to work in the coal mines and die just as his father and hundreds of men in Zollverein have done before him. Once at Schulpforta Werner meets a young boy named Fredrick. He is smart but weak and is constantly getting picked on for having conscience that keeps him from doing terrible things. On top of getting picked on by the student body one of the military leaders at the school, Bastain. After being caught during one of their drills he has one of the students beat Frederick with a hose “This time he catches fredrick on the jaw . Werner forces his mind to keep sending up images of home: the laundry; Frau ELena’s overworked pink fingers; dogs in the alleys; steam blowing from stacks-every part of him wants to scream: is this not wrong?” (Doerr 194). No matter how much Werner wanted to protect Fredrick there was only so much he could do without endangering his own life. In previous times Werner may have protected his friend but being in this dangerous he must keep quiet and let the abuse continue. Even Fredrick knows that the most important thing for anyone in that school is to keep a low profile which is what he is trying to allow Werner to do when he says “Maybe it would be better if we weren’t friends anymore, Werner...I know it's a liability, walking with me, eating with me, always folding my clothes and shining my boots and tutoring me. You have your studies to think of.” (Doerr 251) Marie-Laure also must deal with having the comfort of what she has always known taken away from her when her father was arrested. Her whole life her father had been there to take care of her but suddenly he was gone invoking a bad reaction “On the twentieth morning without any word from her father, Marie laure does not get out of bed.” She is grief stricken by the absence of her father which is understandable since it is said on page 190 that they had never spent the night apart. Though she is pain now the absence of her father will allow her to thrive on her own late. Since all she had left from her father was the model that he made her she must use that to help herself since her father cannot. It is because of the model she learns her way around and becomes independent enough to make trips to the bakery and for her uncle which in turn helps the resistance. When the Germans first invaded Saint Malo Etienne was too afraid to do anything about it. This fear stemmed from his past experiences in the war but as time went on he realized that if he let their reign continue his and Marie-Laure’s lives would suffer greatly. This realization lead and the death of Madame Manec leads him to make the decision to help the resistance. He knows it is a big risk to do this and that he is putting Marie-Laure in danger as discussed in the conversation between Etienne and Marie-Laure (Etienne) “Your father asked me to keep you safe.” “I know” “This will be dangerous. It is not a game.”(Doerr 322) Despite knowing the danger he is putting both of them in he understands without his help the resistance will be nothing but a few weak movements in the community. Once they have Etienne’s help the French and American soldiers were able to learn valuable information that lead to the freeing of Saint Malo. Without his help the resistance wouldn’t have been able to make the impact it did and all of this impact derived from the transformation Etienne underwent. Though Jutta plays a small role in the novel the change we see in her really drives home the idea of survival. She has also had to leave the home she always knew, the orphanage, and begin working so she can get through the currently miserable life she has. The state of Germany is exemplified in the quote “Once she (Jutta) sees a row of three children facedown, backpacks on their backs. Her first thought is: Wake up. Go to school. Then she thinks: There could be food in those packs.” (Doerr 488). At this point Jutta is only fifteen years old but seeing dead bodies has become so normalized to her she has to think more like an adult and focus on finding enough food to survive. Having to live like this creates an obvious personality change from the young imaginative girl we know before Werner leaves to the girl we see in Berlin but it is this shift that made her strong enough to make through that time get to her life as teacher with a happy family. In All the Light We Cannot See readers get to look into the lives of Marie-Laure, Werner, and those around them and witness them mature into strong people who can withstand something as horrendous as World War II. However this change is something people outside of the book must undergo as well if they want to survive in difficult times. Without the strength to endure the challenges thrown at them in tough times one will simply not be able to make it through the turmoil.
He gives up everything that he believes in to follow his dreams of becoming a 8. “‘When I lost my sight,Werner,people said I was brave. When my father left,people said I was bravery;I have no choice”’(Doerr 469). Werner is talking to Marie Laure just after he rescues her. Von Rumpel locates Werner and just when he's about shoot Werner,Marie-Laure drops a brick distracts them both.
War is seen as a universal concept that often causes discomfort and conflict in relation to civilians. As they are a worrying universal event that has occurred for many decades now, they posed questions to society about human's nature and civilization. Questions such as is humanity sane or insane? and do humans have an obsession with destruction vs creation. These questions are posed from the two anti-war texts; Dr Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick and Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut.
The book All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer, was not your traditional love and war story. It’s about a young blind girl named Marie growing up in the war, who had a connection with a young boy named Werner who is a part of the Hitler youth. There are a few other characters who are all in different parts of the world, and yet they eventually all meet up together and find out they all have some type of connection between each other. All of the characters in the book were affected by the war, and caused them to change into the characters that they ended up to be.
War was one of the most difficult and brutal things a society could ever go through. World War II was especially terrible because it affected so many people.World War II was centered in Europe and the people of the European countries felt the effects much more than many of the other countries that were also participating in the world war. In the book All the Light We Cannot See written by Anthony Doerr, the story took place during World War II in Europe, the center stage for the war. This war was one of the most difficult wars because it destroyed homes, displaced thousands, tore families apart, killed off loved ones, and forced people to make tough decisions they had to live with for the rest of their lives. In All The Light We Cannot See,
He walks the reader through the mess of political strife and bloodshed and he is very detailed in the inner workings of the Committee of Public Safety. He also writes as if the reader knows nothing about the French Revolution. This is a very helpful aspect of the book. Another strong point in this particular story is that there is a map of The First French Republic in the front of the book. There is also a key for the titles of the months according to the French Republican Calendar. This calendar is useful in the reading because depending on the time of year as well as the situation he is writing about, he uses month names such as Ventôse which, in current translation is around the twentieth of
The book Then is set in Poland during the period of the Holocaust and Nazis in 1942. The book is about the two orphans, Felix and Zelda, who escaped from a train that travel to a Nazi death camp for Jewish people. They struggled to survive without food or water. They met Genia, a farmer who became their guardian and provided a shelter and kindness to the two children. Felix and Zelda embarked on a terrifying journey to disguise their identity, escape from sinister Nazi soldiers and overcome challenges and suspicions of Genia’s neighbours.
Norman Schwarzkopf Jr, a famous war soldier once said, "The truth of the matter is you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it." Although society has the potential to help others in need they restrict themselves from doing the right thing. But when society is challenged with a problem only some step up against to the odds to make a difference. Throughout history, during times of devastation and separation there are people that show a ray of light that gives people hope during the darkest times.
A natural response to such a violent environment is to simply behave in a way that portrays no weakness. If the soldier does not show any signs of weakness, he finds it much easier to convince himself that he can survive by his strength. In asserting his control over himself by hiding all of his weaknesses, h...
Werner dreams of stepping into the shoes of an engineer, however, to do so he must leave behind his sister Jutta. Sacrificing the relationship between his sister and care-taker, he is used to create Nazi radios to help during war. When Werner asks to leave the institution, punishment only ensued, leaving a void and sense of betrayal within him. Despite the void, the true sacrifice comes toward the end of the novel. When the assistance of the radio enabled Werner and Marie-Lure to communicate. Werner saving Marie-Lure’s life, while killing another.
Dealing with enemies has been a problem since the beginning of time. “I never killed anybody,” Gene had commented later in his life, “And I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform, I was on active duty all my time at Devon; I killed my enemy there.” In A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the value of dealing with enemies is shown by Gene, who was dealing with few human enemies, but his emotions created far greater rivals than any human could ever posses.
The story has two main threads. The first is the true story of Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman's experiences as a young Jewish man during the horrors leading up to and including his confinement in Auschwitz. The second intertwining story is about Vladek as an old man, recounting his history to his son Art, the author of the book, and the complicated relationship between the two of them. It's a difficult process for both father and son, as Vladek tries to make sense of his twighlight years, indelibly marked by his experiences and a slave to the processes he had to resort to in order to make it through. On this level, it's also about Art, as he comes to terms with what his father went through, while still finding the more irritating aspects of his father's personality difficult to live with.
War is having a growing effect on Robert. His exposure to the violence is leaving him in a frail state of mind and physically. His behaviour can be interpreted as being increasingly violent and can show his decreasing mental health which is a sign of physical struggles within th...
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, is a fictional World War II book that uses powerful images to evoke emotions from the reader. The book is staged in many different places throughout Europe, and follows the story of two teenagers, Werner and Marie-Laure. Werner is an albino German orphan, doomed to the life of a coal miner, but when he finds a radio and fixes it his life is completely changed. He goes to an advanced German school where he escapes the miserable life he was once fated to have. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl who lives in Paris until the situation in Germany becomes too strong to ignore. She and her father, the Museum of Natural history's master of locks, flee to a town called Saint-Malo where Marie-Laure becomes a part-time messenger for the French resistance, delivering codes to be played through a secret radio. The book is a fine read for all ages, and readers
The main character Liesel, known as “the book thief” is who Death is looking over. Liesel, her mother, and brother are on a train to Munich. On the train ride her brother dies. She and her mother get off the train to bury him. The first book Liesel steals is from the gravediggers. They continue the journey to a town called Molching, where Liesel will be raised by foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Liesel adjusts to her new home life. Hans teaches Liesel how to read. The war is escalating in Germany. The town holds a book-burning to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. That’s when Liesel steals another book from the flames. Liesel’s job is to deliver laundry to the Hermann family. The Hermanns’ have a library full of books. Liesel is allowed to read them in the study. Meanwhile, a German-Jew named Max needs help, so he seeks out the Hubermanns. Max hides in the basement, so he is safe from the Nazis. Liesel begins stealing books from the Hermanns. The Nazis parade the Jews through the town of Molching on their way to the concentration camp for everyone to see. Liesel is given a blank notebook to write her own story. One night the neighborhood is bombed. Hans, Rosa, and the rest of the neighborhood is killed. Rescue workers find Liesel under the rubble. She leaves behind her finished book, called The Book Thief. Death, who has been watching, rescues the book. Liesel ends up living with the mayor
The beginning of the novel starts with dark images and descriptions; however, toward the end of book 1, the reader encounters images of light and hope. Also, as the reader gets familiar with the characters and the plot, it becomes clear that amid the evil and danger, there is a notion of new beginning. The political disorder of France and England described in the beginning contrasts with the happiness of a family reunited. The hopes of the characters amid the chaos around them are symbolic of the romantic ideals of the revolutionaries, who saw an opportunity for a new beginning in the doom of that epoch.