All The Light We Cannot See Analysis

All the Literature We Cannot See
With as much time and energy that readers divest into reading, they certainly want what they read to be worthwhile. According to Jago, literature is defined as works that are worthwhile, texts that “we’re likely to remember—ones that may, in fact, influence who we are”. By this definition, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See is a marvelous piece of literature. Doerr crafts a story as complex as reality with characters as complicated as real people. The story will linger in the mind, the words somehow leaving behind an unexplainable trace. All the Light We Cannot See is a captivating book. Doerr first captures the reader with his elegant diction and flowing syntax. “At dusk they pour from the sky.
For this line is quite true: “This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark” (Doerr 160). Fear is something everyone faces. Doerr visits the theme of fear often, and reminds readers that “her great-uncle was not always so fearful, that he had a life before this war…he was once a young man who dwelled in the world and loved it has she does” (Doerr 284); the take away is that fear is learned through living. It is in the complex interweaving of the survival versus living theme and the fear theme that a powerful message is delivered. Fear cannot be broken by merely surviving, as evident by the continuing fear of all the characters surviving the war. It is only at the resolution of the book, when the war ends and remaining characters pick themselves up and dust themselves off, that fear is overcome (though not entirely, that is an impossible feat). “We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs” (Doerr 529). By surviving the war, Marie-Laure was able to live again. Her story is a message to all who struggle with fear: survive until living becomes possible again. Fear cannot be forgotten or ignored, but it can be