Two Worlds

Pgs. 1-130 

The second of the two epigraphs preceding the first section of All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, reads, "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without radio."

In Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set in France and Germany before and during World War II, radio plays a complex role: it is at once an enabler and an inhibitor. As the vital method of communication of the era (see: fireside chats across the pond), the radio is integral in connecting the French and German people to the dramatic changes occurring in the world around them. The epigraph, for example, is attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, who helped facilitate the rise of the Nazi Party through his carefully crafted radio addresses to the German people.

But for Werner Pfennig, a German orphan who is eight years old at the onset of the story, the radio is more personal than political; the most important aspect of his relationship with his short-wave radio is not the headlines he hears on it, but the doors that it opens for him. Without his radio, which he found on the street and salvaged out of intuition, Werner is destitute—no parents, no money, no real education.


Meanwhile, in France, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, Doerr's other protagonist, and Werner's foil, is in something of a contrary quandary. Though she has a supportive and loving father, Daniel, and the world of the Paris museum where he works at her disposal, she is blind by the age of six. Her inhibition, then, is markedly physical. Daniel cares so deeply about his daughter's happiness that he builds her a scale replica of their neighborhood so that she can become familiar with her surroundings.

These impediments alone earn readers' sympathy within the first few chapters. But with World War II soon in full swing, Marie-Laure and her father, along with Werner and his sister, Jutta, have bigger fish to fry. When the Nazis invade France, Daniel resolves to bring his daughter away from the imminent danger in Paris, and, toward the end of this section, the two flee to the walled city of Saint-Malo, on France's northwestern coast. 

In Germany, whose institutions have eroded under history's most notorious authoritarian, Werner passes a series of rigorous tests and quickly ascends the ranks of Hitler Youth. A conflict quickly emerges: how are readers supposed to feel about Werner at this point? We have been led to sympathize with him, and we understand that he really has no choice. He is, after all, eight years old, and therefore cannot comprehend the meaning of the Nazis' rise. In a later post, I'll elaborate on how readers approach Werner's precarious position.

Thus All the Light We Cannot See presents a historical dichotomy. On the one hand, we have Marie-Laure and her father, who, if they make it out of the war alive, will be on the side of the victors. On the other hand, we have Werner, who has unwittingly joined the ranks of one of the century's most brutal regime.


But Werner has his radio—his conduit to a world beyond his own. "How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house," Doerr writes. "While the other children play hopscotch in the alley or swim in the canal, Werner sits alone in his upstairs dormer, experimenting with the radio receiver. In a week he can dismantle and rebuild it with his eyes closed....Nothing he's encountered before has made so much sense." The radio gives Werner structure, just as it gave the Nazis a backbone. "It ties a million ears to a single mouth," Doerr muses. As the story progresses, it will be interesting to see to what extent Werner and Marie-Laure's own lives are determined by their harsh worlds and to what extent they are able to shape their fates.