Symbolism Of Light In All The Light We Cannot See
In All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, symbolism relating to light helps develop the mood and setting of France and Germany in WWII, helping the reader visualize how terrible war is and how beautiful life can be outside of war. It also helps the reader feel emotion about the story so that they can understand how complicated the characters are. Symbolism relating to light created through stylistic devices helps develop the characters’ internal struggles and their fate. Symbolism about light and different colours helps the reader understand that people and situations are never just good or bad, that there can be many different colours within things and people, mainly that people are complicated. This also helps support the title “All the Light We Cannot See” which shows that characters are mysterious and that we can’t ever really know everything about them but we can guess at their fate.
War is destructive to lives and beautiful things. In All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, symbolism helps develop the mood and setting of France and Germany in WWII, helping the reader visualize how terrible war is and how beautiful life is outside of war. It also helps the reader feel emotion about the story, the characters and their fate. Beauty and ugliness are found in the imagery together which can make the reader feel war is not natural and that beauty is being destroyed: “They cross the Channel at midnight. There are twelve and they are named for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin’ Mama. The sea glides along far below, spattered with the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon. France. Intercoms crackle. Deliberately, almost lazily, the bombers shed altitude. Threads of red light ascend from anti-air emplacements up and down the coast. Dark, ruined ships appear, scuttled or destroyed, one with its bow shorn away, a second flickering as it burns. On an outermost island, panicked sheep run zigzagging between rocks. Inside each airplane, a bombardier peers through an aiming window and counts to twenty. Four five six seven. To the bombardiers. The walled city on it’s granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be launched away.” There is a paradox in the beauty and ugliness of the imagery.
For example, the bombers are named for songs, the landscape “the sea glides along far below spattered with the countless chevrons of whitecaps”. Then “intercoms crackle”, “bombers shed altitude” which is personification as if they are living things. Werner has a very sad upbringing in a coal mining town and the imagery makes the reader feel how bare and gray his town is: ”Werner Pfennig grows up three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coal mining complex outside Essen, Germany. It’s steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes. Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld”. It is a place that has no nature and makes the reader think of death, the skeleton hands are bones which have been stripped of flesh which happens after death, and leafless trees are compared to them because of how bare the landscape is. It makes the reader feel bad for Werner because he became an orphan and the only way he can get out of poverty is to join the war. Marie-Laure has a beautiful life before the war, even though she is going blind: “The miniature intersection of rue de Mirbel and rue Monge, for example, just a block from their apartment, is nothing like the real intersection. The real one presents an amphitheater of noise and fragrance: in the fall it smells of traffic and castor oil, bread from the bakery, camphor from Avent’s pharmacy, delphiniums and sweet peas and roses from the flower stand. On winter days it swims with the odor of roasting chestnuts; on summer evenings it becomes slow and drowsy, full of sleepy conversations and the scraping of heavy iron chairs.” Although she has become blind, her other senses help her detect how beautiful her surroundings are. Although the reader feels sorry for her that she is blind, she is lucky enough to be able to roam the streets safely safely as a blind girl. Marie-Laure and Werner have very different fates.
Symbolism in this story that revolves around the topic of light, is created by using stylistic devices which helps develop the characters’ internal conflict. Marie-Laure is old, she remembers back to her childhood and what Werner meant to her, Werner’s sister went to see her: “Below them the wind washes frost from the trees. She concentrates on feeling the sun touch the backs of her hands. On the warmth of her grandson beside her.” This passage symbolizes the sunshine, nature and her fate which was to have a happy and fulfilling life. She had a difficult childhood because of the war and her blindness but she had hope and she had people who cared for her. She was able to have a good life because she had a good mindset and she had people who loved her. The sun on the back of her hands symbolizes happiness for her at the end of the book. Frederick was a good friend to Werner, he was enrolled in the war with Werner and he was brutal but had a big heart. He saw the good in Werner when times were bad in Hitler’s army. Almost no nature instead of birds there are plastic bags flying and spinning. He used to love birds, he was obsessed with birds and knowing all about them but there are no birds, just bags. He loved birds, the bird arriving on his railing was a symbol of hope and that maybe his life could change. The bird getting swallowed by darkness is his hopes and dreams getting crushed: “Frank Volkheimer’s third-floor walk-up in the suburbs of Pforzheim, Germany, possesses three windows. A single billboard, mounted on the cornice of the building across the alley, dominates the view; its surface gleams three yards beyond the glass. Printed on it are processed meats, cold cuts as tall as he is, reds and pinks, gray at the edges, garnished with parsley sprigs the size of shrubs. At night the billboard’s four cheerless electric spotlights bathe his apartment in a strange reflected glare. He is fifty-one years old. April rain falls slantwise through the billboard’s spotlights and Volkheimer’s television flickers blue and he ducks habitually as he passes through the doorway between his kitchen and the main room.” In this part of the book, artificial light shines in his life surrounding him symbolizes the simplicity and greyness of his life. Life exhausts him. Nothing natural, all artificial, processed meat. Parsley sprigs as large as shrubs but they aren’t shrubs, electric spotlights personified as cheerless and bathe his apartment in a strange light. All artificial light, spotlights, glass, blue flicker of a television. Volkheimer has no hope, he’s unhappy
Symbolism about light and different colours reflects hope, and darkness represents loss of hope. A broadcast that happened to be by Marie-Laure’s grandfather was heard by Werner and his sister, Jutta: “Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years – eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like stone, and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house, and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight – sunlight one hundred million years old – is heating your home tonight…”. Etienne is playing it for Marie-Laure. A plant that grew thanks to sunlight can die, decay and turn to coal and be burned and glow again like the sunshine that helped make it. This helps Werner feel optimistic. Jutta and Werner’s hope for a better life being crushed: “Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it.” The colours of the boat represent hope. Werner and jutta had built a little sailboat. just before he steps on a landmine, he remembers his childhood. Darkness is personified and swallows the boat representing hope, but he is still hopeful. After saving Marie-Laure and just before Werner dies by stepping on a landmine, he thinks about where he was born and the men who were waiting to die: “The darkness returns to Werner’s eyes, and he feels faint. Soon his legs will give out. A cat sits in the road licking a paw and smoothing it over its ears and watching him. He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.” This is a metaphor that helps the reader visualize the hope that Werner is feeling about living a long life and that every moment should be treasured. Even though Werner was a soldier in Hitler’s army and did terrible things and was a bystander to terrible war acts, he thought life was a treasure that shouldn’t be wasted.
In All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, symbolism around the topic of light, develops the setting and tone of Europe in WW2 where the characters live. These symbolic devices help the reader visualize how horrible and destructive war is but also how beautiful life can be. Symbolism of light helps the reader understand the different feelings and fates of the characters. Where some are hopeful and beautiful meanwhile others are tragedies.
