Character Analysis: All The Light We Cannot See

The polish activist, Irena Sendler. once observed, ¨People can be only divided into good and bad; their race, religion, nationality don´t matter¨ (Sendler). Is it really possible to draw a demarcation line between people and divide them into good or bad? This kind of either-or thinking begs the question whether there might be other categories of individuals that overlap each other in term of personality and defy such simplistic definition as good or bad. The novel All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a fitting example of fiction to discuss the difference between polarized characters. The characters in All The Light We Cannot See appear to be larger than life and cannot be strictly labelled as positive or negative. The polarized or

One of the two protagonists of All The Light We Cannot See, Marie-Laure LeBlanc. is an intellectually, inquisitive and adventurous girl. She becomes blind at the age of six, but learns to adapt to this and continue to explore, learn and discover the world around her. For most of the novel, Marie-Laure is a teenager, but by the end of the novel she is an old woman. Marie-Laure is considered to be a positive character because of her realization of the fact that her blindness does not control her, and it has no reason to be a source of her fear. She says in the novel “That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark” (Doerr,160). This quotation is Marie-Laure’s realization and understanding of fears, because of this understanding Marie-Laure begins to use her hand and power of logical reasoning rather

Werner Pfennig is a young, intelligent German boy. Warner has whitish-blonde hair, blue eyes, and is strikingly intelligent so he seems like a model of the master race of the Nazis, except that he has a stronger moral compass than most of his peers. Warner develops a close relationship with his sister, Jutla Pfenning, during his adolescence. They both lives at an orphanage because their father died in a mining accident, and their mother’s fate is unknown. He, standing beside his sister after his father’s death, is a strong act that proves he is a positive character. “Open your eyes... and see what you can with them before they close forever, and then the piano comes on playing a lonely song that sounds to warner like a golden boat” (Doerr, 48). This statement shows how Warner is a character who sees the full half of the cup as he sees the positive side of everything, and if something does not have a positive side he imagens one. Warner is considered a positive character because he thinks about others before he thinks about himself. “But if the keeper threw the diamond into the sea, there by delivering it to its rightful recipient, the goddess would life the curse” (Doerr, 21). This quotation contains information about the diamond which is the main symbol of the novel, but even when Warner had the diamond he should have kept it, but he returns it back to the water because he loves the people around him and does not