All the Light We Cannot See Literary Devices

Definition of Imagery

Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition

Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition

Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition

Explanation and Analysis—Blindness and the Senses:

Sensory imagery in the novel abounds, particularly when Doerr describes Marie-Laurie’s actions and emotions. She is blind, so her other senses are heightened. Doerr uses imagery to illustrate this, taking care to outline in detail the various ways Marie-Laure's sense of touch, smell, taste, and hearing connect her strongly to the world around her. Though as a character she is blind, her point of view does not come across as limited to the reader—quite the contrary. Her experience of the world is bright and colorful, filled with full sounds and textures and tastes, made all the richer for her other sensory deprivation.

This vivid sensory imagery does not vary from scene to scene, but is rather a constant throughout the novel. Marie-Laure's perspective on the world—and, to a certain extent, Werner's—consumes the novel's style entirely, not limited simply to passages written from Marie-Laure's perspective. Doerr seems not only to want the reader to understand this sensory heightening, but to experience the entirety of the novel within it. Through his liberal use of sensory imagery, Doerr asks the reader to "see" beyond simple sight: to look deep into the heart of something or someone and perceive its interconnectedness with the surrounding world.

Explanation and Analysis—Ribs:

In Section Zero, Doerr describes the devastation of Saint Malo, using imagery and metaphor to paint a vivid picture of the destruction:

In stormy light, its granite glows blue. At the highest tides, the sea creeps into basements at the
very center of town. At the lowest tides, the barnacled ribs of a thousand shipwrecks stick out
above the sea.

Saint-Malo and its surroundings include the "barnacled ribs of a thousand shipwrecks." These ships both represent the physical wreckage of war and the human wreckage. The ships' torn hulls may visually resemble human ribcages, split open to reveal their innards to the ocean. This metaphor emphasizes the extent of the infrastructural destruction caused by war, but it also provides an indirect commentary on war's human cost. Through visual imagery, Doerr forges a connection between the decimated ships and the decimated bodies of soldiers, many of whom are likely buried with the ships, their ribcages also open to the sea. The "bodies" of the ships lying in the harbor symbolize the bodies of dead men: disregarded, left to rot, a second thought amidst the ongoing carnage and strategic maneuvering of war. Like these ships, bodies lie abandoned, unclaimed, unburied, awaiting peacetime to reach their final resting place.

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Explanation and Analysis—Textured Kindgom:

In Section One, Marie-Laure tragically loses her vision. Her father, Daniel, does everything he can to accommodate his daughter's emergent needs, including bringing her to work with him at the museum. While Daniel works, Marie-Laure observes the work of scientists and staff, honing her other senses on the museum's unique natural specimens. Doerr uses both imagery and metaphor to describe one such specimen, a shell:

The murex Dr. Geffard keeps on his desk can entertain her for a half hour, the hollow spines, the ridged whorls, the deep entrance; it’s a forest of spikes and caves and textures; it’s a kingdom.

In this passage, Doerr uses vivid figurative language, describing Marie-Laure's use of touch as a sensorial experience akin to "seeing" the shell. Marie-Laure's textural experience of the shell appears far richer than that of a sighted person: she imagines entire forests, caves, and kingdoms under her fingers, where a sighted person might only see "spikes." Blindness restricts Marie-Laure's sensory experience of the world. In the absence of sight, other senses expand their capacity, and under Marie-Laure's careful touch, entire worlds blossom. Through imagery, Doerr conveys this shift in the senses, focusing on the ways in which Marie-Laure's world grows richer for her lack of sight.

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Explanation and Analysis—Color:

Marie-Laure is able to "see" color without really seeing it, taking her impressions from past knowledge and whatever emotional associations she forms between certain colors and people or circumstances. When she shares a more intimate relationship with another person, such as with her father, the array of colors Marie-Laure "sees" expands:

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father
radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and
metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He
is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he
speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows
sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works,
the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue.

In this excerpt, Doerr uses vivid sensory imagery to describe the way Marie-Laure envisions those around her. Though she cannot see, Marie-Laure is still highly capable of visualizing friends, family, and acquaintances via the impressions they leave on her, which she interprets as color. This imaginative power allows Marie-Laure to even "see" those who are dead and gone: in her mind, Marie's mother is resurrected, and she can "look" upon a mother lost to her in reality.

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Explanation and Analysis—Guns and Light:

In the following example from Section One, Doerr uses visual imagery as a commentary on war, weaponry, power, and the German police state:

The lance corporal looks around the room—the coal stove, the hanging laundry, the undersize
children—with equal measures of condescension and hostility. His handgun is black; it seems to
draw all the light in the room toward it.

In this excerpt, Doerr focuses the reader's attention on the lance corporal's gun through visual imagery, drawing one's eyes to the weapon the same way Werner's would be. Doerr describes the gun both as "black" and as "draw[ing] all the light in the room toward it." Throughout All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr uses light and vision interchangeably, substituting one for the other. When Doerr speaks of the gun "draw[ing] light" to it, he implies that all eyes in the room are drawn to the gun, as the conspicuous, threatening show of force it represents.

The gun "draw[s] light" to it for another reason: it is black. According to the physics of light, the color black results from complete absorption of all colored wavelengths on the visible spectrum. Given that the passage above is written in part from Werner's perspective, this imagery reflects the young boy's inclination to process his world and various human interactions through the language of physics—of light.

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All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See: Imagery 5 key examples