All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See is written in an unusual style. The novel consists of almost two hundred chapters (no more than two or three pages each), narrated in the present tense, usually from the perspectives of Werner Pfennig, a German boy, or Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French girl. For the majority of the book, these two plots aren’t connected in any strong way—it’s only toward the end that Werner and Marie-Laure meet, and even then, their meeting is surprisingly short. It’s worth thinking about the implications of Doerr’s style, and how it echoes the content of the novel itself.

One reason that Doerr writes his novel in this way is to modestly acknowledge the impossibility of telling a story “about” World War II. The novel makes clear that Werner and Marie-Laure are just two people out of millions who lived through the war, each with a unique story to tell. The lives of Marie-Laure and Werner are important, of course, but they’re not the entire story of the war. In fact, the small, intimate nature of Werner and Marie-Laure’s experiences—the fact that their lives are relatively unimportant to history—makes the two plots more poignant. When an explosion kills Werner at the end of the novel, we experience this as a tragedy, while also recognizing that Werner’s cruel, meaningless death is only a microscopic part of the total tragedy of the war.

This points to another important reason why Doerr chooses to write a “two-plot novel”: such a book is simply a more realistic depiction of what life is like. In an ordinary book, a small number of characters interact with one another: there are main characters, secondary characters, etc. In this novel, however, the distinction between main and secondary breaks down. A character who’s important to Marie-Laure’s story, such as Etienne, her great-uncle, is relatively unimportant to Werner’s story, and vice-versa. By the same token, small details in one person’s life can be hugely important in another person’s life. In general, all people—even distant strangers—are connected with one another via these small details, in ways that are too complicated to be understood easily. Doerr’s novel climaxes when Marie-Laure and Werner—two people who come from different countries, and don’t know each other at all—realize that they do have something in common: years before, Werner fell in love with the radio broadcasts made by Marie-Laure’s grandfather, Henri. In a large, complicated universe, coincidences like this are likely to occur, even if we don’t see most of them.

By the time Marie-Laure and Werner meet each other, we’ve been anticipating the event for hundreds of pages—but the emotional connection between Werner and Marie-Laure is spare and short-lived. The tragic irony of All the Light We Cannot See is that Werner and Marie-Laure part ways almost as soon as they’ve introduced themselves. We as readers want them to get to know each other, but the circumstances simply don’t allow it. Soon afterwards, Werner is killed by a land mine. Marie-Laure lives a long, productive life, but she shows no signs of knowing Werner—indeed, in the final chapter of the book, set in 2014, she thinks of him as a spirit walking the streets of Paris, unable to communicate with her.

From the beginning, Doerr suggests that his characters’ lives may be insignificant in the grand scheme of history, but that doesn’t make them any less important or powerful as human stories. Furthermore, Doerr implies that Werner’s life is also relatively unimportant in the “grand scheme” of Marie-Laure’s life, and vice versa. Werner may save Marie-Laure’s life, but this doesn’t mean that Marie-Laure spends the rest of her life contemplating her savior. The brevity and fragility of the emotional bond between Marie-Laure and Werner, then, makes the connection between them even more powerful.

There are many books with multiple storylines, but what distinguishes All the Light We Cannot See from most of these books is that the two plots in Doerr’s novel largely remain separate. Werner and Marie-Laure live out parallel lives, but in the end they’re not united—their lives merely overlap in small, often barely discernible ways. While this may seem frustrating and dramatically unsatisfying, it’s a sign of Doerr’s commitment to a realistic view of how the world works—even if he achieves this realism through often fantastical ways. The millions of “plots” on the planet may be interconnected, but these connections often go unnoticed, and, in the end, they’re still separate.