Analysis: All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
PART 0: 7 AUGUST 1944
Leaflets rain down on Saint Malo informing citizens of the impending bombing. Marie-Laure is 16, Werner Pfennig is 18. Marie-Laure looks over a model of Saint Malo, “the model is a miniature of the city,” and possesses “scale replicas of the hundreds of houses and shops within its walls” – “the cathedral with its perforated spire” and “row after row of sea side mansions.” Here we have an example of ekphrasis - the artistic description of a work of art as a literary device.
Werner is in the Hotel of Bees. Once, “a cheerful address” where “Parisians on holidays would drink aperitifs,” now “the hotel has become something else: a fortress” filled with “crates of artilleries.” The destruction of culture and the history of the Hotel of Bees due to World War II is clear.
It was once “the home of a wealthy privateer” who gave up a life of raiding ships for one of “eating honey straight from combs.” Instead the wonder and romanticism associated with French culture has been marred by the constant presence of war. Now the Hotel of Bees is home to “Her Majesty,” which is what “the Austrians call their cannon.”
PART ONE: 1934 (10 Years Prior)
MARIE-LAURE
Marie-Laure is 6 & Werner is 8. It’s clear now that the story follows a non-linear format, symptomatic of the postmodernist style. We can expect, from now, that the narrative will jump back and forward in time.
Marie-Laure’s childhood centered around the National Museum of Natural History, where she was surrounded by objects of curiosity - “a fossilised dinosaur femur,” and a “stuffed giraffe in the closet.”
Daniel LeBlanc often “…leaves Marie-Laure in the laboratory of Dr. Geffard,” he is an “aging mollusk expert” with “cabinets that contain more drawers than she can count….whelks, olives, imperial volutes from Thailand.” “The museum possesses more than ten thousand specimens, over half the known world,” and Marie-Laure finds comfort in “the hollow spines, the ridged whorls, the deep entrance,” of these whelks. “It’s a forest of spikes and caves and textures,” she finds, “it’s a kingdom.” The symbolism around the whelk is a significant, as it reoccurs as a defining descriptor of Marie-Laure’s own character. Like the tough shell of a whelk, Marie-Laure too hardens her character, honing her strength is response to adversity.
Part One is also significant as we see one of our first examples of metafiction - we see a story embedded within a story in the form of the museum attendant’s narrative around the Sea of Flames.
“Centuries ago…a prince plucked a blue stone from a dry riverbed because he thought it was pretty,” the attendant narrates. “The stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen…it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at its centre, like flames inside a drop of water.”
However the gem brought with it cursed luck, as those near the prince died while he himself continued to survive - “the longer the prince wore his crown, the worse his luck became…within six months, his father died of disease.” The attendant advises that, “the Goddess of Earth…made the sea of flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea…but when the river dried up and the prince plucked it out…[The Goddess] cursed the stone and whoever kept it.”
“The curse was this: the keeper of the stone would live forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortune would fall on those he loved one after another in unending rain.”
The attendant’s final words regarding the stone are central to its symbolism throughout the narrative, “you have to believe the story.”
It is belief regarding the stone’s importance that propels Von Rumpel’s desire to attain it at all costs later on in the plot, as he believes it will prolong his life and cure the illnesses consuming him. Alternatively, Doerr provides that the stone could be little more than crystallised carbon - the ‘fate’ it propels is often little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy aided by the intentions and decisions of characters.
Years pass and German pressure and occupation in France heightens, as both she and Daniel LeBlanc flee Paris.
In early 1940 both Marie-Laure and Daniel flee to Gare Saint-Lazare escaping before German occupation, via train as they run to Evreux. Marie-Laure realises she is losing all possibility of normal life, where she would hear the refrains of every day speech - “Bonjour, bonjour. Potatoes at six-olock, Marie. Mushrooms at three.” Frantically, she asks herself, “Now? What will happen?”
WERNER
Part One is also where we first meet Werner as a child in Zollverein. Zollverein is “a four-thousand-acre coal-mining complex outside Essen,” where “leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.”
Werner’s environment reflects the consequences of World War I, as “men brawl over jobs outside the Zollverein gates, and chicken eggs sell for two million reichmarks apiece…” Zollverein, as a mining town defined by poverty, holds the same fate for every young man born within its walls. Werner looks at “the miners spilling out…like insects towards a lighted trap,” down into the depths of the Earth, “where [his] Father died.”
Despite this environment, Werner’s character is defined by curiosity and resilience, a similarity between his own character and Marie-Laure’s. “Every morning he…begins interrogating the world,” “he captures snowflakes, tadpoles, hibernating frogs; he coaxes bread from bakers with none to sell.” “He makes things too: paper boxes, crude biplanes, toy boats with working rudders.”
In the Autumn of 1936 he finds the broken radio. “The little radio with its four terminals and trailing aerial sits motionless on the floor between them all like a miracle.” As he repairs the radio, “the sorcery of it holds him rapt,” sparking his passion for technology.
It is here that he recognises that connection between propaganda and technology, as the radio plays a narrative where “the invaders pose as hook nosed department store owners, crooked jewellers, dishonourable bankers…” “Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.” “The staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean towards its branches as if towards the lips of Gods.”
It is also where he first understands the connection between education and the radio, as he hears the broadcast of the Frenchman. “The Frenchman’s voice is velvet” and he “talks about optical illusions, electromagnetism…he enthuses about coal.” The Frenchman’s voice is “like a golden boat traveling a dark river,” “a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein.”
As Werner works on the radio, he experiences his first opportunity to distinguish himself to the Reich. Herr Seidler provides him, “the finest radio he has ever laid hands on….Herr Siedler could probably hear Africa if he wanted too.”
After he fixes Herr Seidler’s radio, he is told that “there are places for boys like [him], General Heissmeyer’s schools.” In light of this experience, Werner decides to preserve his chance to leave Zollverein and seize future opportunity, as he “takes the little shortwave radio” that he and his sister found, “and carries it into the alley behind the house and crushes it with a brick.”
The culture of Zollverein also begins to shift around this time, as “Frau Elena speaks French less and less frequently.” The boys in Werner’s orphanage “carry slingshots, fashion spears, rehearse ambushes from behind snowbanks” “Our flag represents the new era, chant Hans and Herribert, our flag leads us to eternity.”
Werner’s desperation to leave begins to heighten as reflects on how his father died in the mines, his “body never recovered” as he “haunt[s] the tunnels still.” In his nightmares, Werner “walks the tunnels of the mines. The ceiling is smooth and black; slabs of it descend as he treads.” “Soon he cannot raise his head, move his arms” and “the ceiling weigh ten trillion tons…just before he wakes, he feels splintering at the back of his skull.”
PART TWO: 8 AUGUST 1944
MARIE-LAURE
We have quickly jumped forward in time, back to the German bombing of Saint-Malo which traps both Marie-Laure and Werner within the city.
The description of the brutality of war, and its consequences on the landscape, are extreme, as “doors soar away from their frames” and “bricks transmute into powder.” The Hotel of Bees is “lifted in a spiral of flame.”
WERNER
Werner too is struggling to survive through the extremity of violence. He is briefly transported back to his childhood in Zollverein, “standing above a grave a miner had dug for two mules at the edge of the field.” “The skin of the mules had grown nearly translucent,” and he was so hungry as to wonder “if there was anything on them worth eating.” The symbolism behind the mules is powerful - like them, in this instance, Werner is little more than a trapped animal, on the verge of death, as he too is buried alive by the collapsing building around him.
The fate of this specific death - burial in Earth which crushes him, follows him everywhere. It has haunted him since the death of his father in the mines, as a prophecy. It appears in his dreams, and it is relevant now when he realises that he may die in the cellars of the Hotel.
PART THREE: JUNE 1940
MARIE-LAURE
Having fleed from Paris to Evreux, both Marie-Laure and Daniel look for Monsieur Giannot’s house. However, when they reach it, it is on fire as “sullen heaps of smoke pump upward through the trees.” They decide to fine Etienne, Marie-Laure’s uncle who is “seventy-six percent crazy.”
Daniel convinces himself that this is not the work of the Sea of Flames. “A diamond, the locksmith reminds himself, is only a piece of carbon compressed in the bowels of the earth for eons and driven to the surface in a volcanic pipe...It can harbour a curse no more than a leaf can, or a mirror, or a life. There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.”
It is Madame Manec who greets both Marie-Laure and Etienne when they arrive in Saint-Malo. “My god, there are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together,” she says.
As Marie-Laure begins to spend more time with Etienne, she learns of his experiences in World War I with his brother, Henri. “We had a dream together, Henri and I to make recordings and sell them. He had the voice and I had the brains… We became signalmen…Most nights the enemy would shot pistol flares…to illuminate possible targets for snipers. I’d become paralysed sometimes, I could not move any part of my body…Henri would stay right beside me and whisper those scrips, the ones we recorded. Sometimes all night. Over and over. As though weaving some kind of a protective screen.”
Where the steady pressure of German occupation in France begins to put pressure on ordinary citizens, there are some that look for opportunity in this change of authority. Claude Levitte, Etienne’s neighbour is a perfumer.
As he watches Daniel LeBlanc measure out the roads for Marie-Laure (to make her a model of the city), he decides that, “occupation authorities will want to know that stranger is pacing off distances and making drawings of houses. They will want to know what he looks like, who is sponsoring this activity.” It is on the basis of this accusation that Daniel LeBlanc is sentenced to prison.
WERNER
Werner attempts the entrance exam for the National Political Institute of Education held in Essen. He is told that he is, “attempting to enter the most elite schools in the world. The exams will last eight days. We will only take the purest, the strongest.”
There are “raciological exams” which “measures the distance between Werner’s temples, the circumference of his head, and the thickness and shape of his lips.” They gauge “Werner’s eye color against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so shades of blue are displayed.”
Werner feels intense desperation to escape his future in the mines, he sees the “fire breathing mills, men teeming out of elevator shafts like ants,” and he remembers the taste of possibility, “of whipped cream and powdered sugar” he ate at Herr Siedler’s house.
Five days after the tests he receives “the letter.” He is “to report to the National Police Institute of Education #6 at Schulpforta.” Werner feels relief that he “has found a way out.”
Schulpforta is a demanding environment. A one-armed bunk master tells the boys that they must “strip away [their] weakness, [their] cowardice, [their] hesitation.” “[They must] eat country and breathe nation.” “A portrait of the fuhrer glowers over every classroom.”
In his letters to Jutta he tells her about Reiner Schicker, “a young corporal and his captain needed someone to go behind enemy lines….Reiner Schicker was the only one who stood up. But the next day Reiner Schicker was caught…They gave him so much electricity that his brain liquefied….He said “I only regret I have but one life to lose for my country.” The power of propaganda is clear in how it shapes the mind of the boys in the institute.
VON RUMPEL
Part Three is where we also learn more of Von Rumpel. “Before the war, the life of Reinhold von Rumpel was pleasant enough: he was a gemologist who ran an appraisal business…” However, “because of the war, his job has expanded….” as he looks to find the treasures of Europe for the glory of the German empire. In particular, he decides, he must look for the Sea of Flames.
PART FOUR: 8 AUGUST 1944
WERNER
Both Werner and Volkheimer sit bunkered in the Hotel of Bees, alongside Bernd, the engineer who “squirms in pain.”
Werner reflects that they are “the blade of the Reich,” and for this they have “some greater price to pay.” Werner’s recognition that he has acted immorally as “the executor of orders” reveals another strand on the string of fate which binds characters throughout the narrative. Doerr thus reveals Werner’s belief in karmic suffering - that the pain he has caused to others must be restituted through his own suffering.
MARIE-LAURE
Like Werner, Marie-Laure suffers through the German occupation of Saint-Malo, desperately “rov[ing] the cellar” she looks for cans of food, desperate to satiate her hunger.
VON RUMPEL
Meanwhile, Sergeant Major Von Rumpel, moves slowly towards Number 4 rue Vauborel, where Marie-Laure hides. He considers, “the dangers he is willing to endure.” Both “for the Reich” and “for himself.”
PART FIVE: JANUARY 1941
WERNER
Part Five begins with the suffering of Frederick at the hands of the Schulpforta boys. He “limp[s] around bruised and slow-footed,” his face a “map of purples and yellows,” yet he speaks to Werner only in his "own gentle brand of distracted kindness.” Werner feels that he has betrayed Frederick, in not “demanding justice,” in doing “nothing while Frederick was beaten.”
Frederick however, with his customary kindness, invites Werner to his home in Berlin. It is there that Werner meets Frau Shwartzenberger, “a jewess,” in the elevator. “On the breast of her coat,” Werner notices, “a mustard-yellow star has been carefully stitched.” Doerr reminds us of the cruelty perpetuated by the Reich, in the dehumanisation, segregation, and extermination of all those who are not Aryan. It is this predatory oppression, which Werner and Frederick are to enforce, as supporters of the Nazi regime.
Frederick and Werner are still depicted to be worthy of compassion and understanding, despite the terrible nature of the regime they support. As Frederick shows Werner Birds of America, full of “lush full-color paintings of birds,” Werner recognises the beauty of Frederick’s intellectual curiosity. He sees it echoed in his own love of Hertz’s The Principles of Mechanics. These birds he realises, are “blue-winged trumpeting mysteries” to Frederick.
While both Frederick and Werner share intellectual curiosity, their perception of fate and free will differs. When Werner asks Frederick, whether he wants to return Schulpforta, Frederick replies that “it doesn’t matter” what he wants, as unlike Werner he does not believe that he “own[s] [his] life.”
Despite Frederick’s belief, that the wheels of history and the tides of fate are more powerful than the choices made by the individual, Frederick still chooses to exercise his independent will. This is clear when the boys return to Schulpforta and are confronted by “an Untermensch,” a man who “escaped from a work camp,” who is now made prisoner. As Volkheimer returns with “a clattering raft of buckets,” and “a water hose,” the boys would “file past and soak the prisoner with a bucket of water.” “The prisoner’s face empties,” as bucket upon bucket of water is emptied upon him. It is only Frederick who “pours the water onto the ground,” staunchly refusing to torture the prisoner, who “he recognises” to be a fellow man.
It is as a result of this decision making that “Frederick is chosen the weakest in the field exercises” as the boys race after him “through deep snow” as they rain blow upon blow on him before he falls. Boys begin to “leave dead mice in Frederick’s boots,” an attempt at “winnowing out the inferior, the unruly.” While Werner “polishes Frederick’s boots for him,” and “helps him with his schoolwork,” he does not defend Frederick against the merciless cruelty of Schulpforta.
Where Frederick suffers, Werner works to use the transmitter in order to track the radio waves of dissidents and traitors to the Nazi regime. As he walks behind Volkheimer, “crossing a field of gravestones at night,” a part of “Werner’s soul shuts its scaly eyes.”
As Werner chooses to turn a blind eye to the brutality, inhumanity and suffering perpetuated by the Nazi regime, he also sacrifices his relationship to Frederick. With “twenty boys closing over Frederick’s body like rats,” all that is left is “a single bed with blood in it.”
When Werner goes to visit Frederick, he realises Frederick has been made a shell of his former self, “each eye a stagnant pool” his gaze “stuck in some terrible middle ground.” With this in mind, Werner must now leave Schulpforta, as he has been called to serve.
MARIE-LAURE
Marie-Laure, like Werner, is also suffering in 1941. When she realises that her father will not return, “she hardly eats,” and “does not bathe.” She retreats into herself, “like a snail.” It is only with Madame Manec’s persistent love and care that she begins to participate in life around Saint-Malo, as she makes friends with Crazy Hubert Bazin and listens into the gossip of Madame Fontineau and Madame Ruelle.
When this gossip slowly evolves into an “old ladies’ resistance club,” Marie-Laure adopts the moniker of “the Whelk,” as alongside Madame Guiboux, Madame Ruelle and Madame Fontineau they work to subvert German occupation of France. “Scheming” and “gabbling” they look to pass information on to those capable of supporting French resistance, checking for “insignia[s] on…license plates” and other information that is “very much in demand.”
Madame Manec justifies this resistance to Etienne with her parable of the frog. “‘When you drop a frog in pot of boiling water,’” Madame Manec explains, “‘it jumps out.’” However, when you “put the frog in a pot of cool water and slowly bring it to a boil,” this time “the frog cooks.” T
he steady rise in temperature which is not recognised by the frog, Madame Manec is arguing, is the same as Etienne not realising the steady cost he is paying in relinquishing his freedom under the threat of facism. Like “the frog,” without sustained resistance, soon all of France will also “cook.”
It is this lesson of bravery that she leaves Marie-Laure with, as in the final chapter of Part Five, Madame Manec passes away.
PART SIX: 8 AUGUST 1944
MARIE-LAURE & VON RUMPEL
Marie-Laure recognises that Von Rumpel has come for her, his lopsided gait a telling sign that he is the “German sergeant major with a dead voice.” She wishes to retreat into herself, as “a snail coiled up in her shell,” but eventually moves into hiding. “Protect me now,” she asks the stone, “if you are a protector.”
WERNER
As Werner works to repair the radio, Bernd, the Engineer reflects upon his life. He tells Volkheimer and Werner about the death of his father. Bernd had “ridden trains all goddamn day to see him,” but ended up leaving without closure, “just like that.” The difficulty Bernd experiences in articulating himself to his father has haunted him - a regret he recognises on his own deathbed.
PART SEVEN: AUGUST 1942
WERNER
We have jumped back in time to the beginning of Werner’s service within the war. He meets both Neumann One and Neumann Two as part of his "induction into the Wehrmacht.”
As they leave Schulpforta and travel through Leipzig and Lodz, Werner sees “a blacked out locomotive,” with multiple flatcars “all full.” Each “car [had] a wall of corpses stacked in the front,” “thousands” of prisoners, “a river of humans,” with “pale and waxy” faces, suffering due to the Reich.
Werner uses his skillset to track “illegal transmission[s]” throughout Europe, where the rest of the hit squad works to eliminate them. While Werner pushes himself to believe the words of the Reich, that the Germans are fighting against “dangerous disciplined insurgents,” however he realises the falsity of this through the violence he helps inflict on the front lines.
In April 1944, Werner hears a Swiss German transmission which he triangulates to a “fifth floor flat.” Instead of killing insurgents however, Werner leads the team to a family, as Neumann Two fires “a single shot” and a woman “screams.” Turning into the closet, Werner is met with the sight of “a child sitting on her bottom with a bullet through her head.” “Threads of nausea reach up Werner’s windpipe,” as he recognises he is responsible for the death of innocents.
MARIE-LAURE
Etienne’s decision to participate in the resistance, inspired by Madame Manec’s bravery, allows them to utilise their microphone and radio equipment to transmit information to other dissidents.
Marie-Laure advises Etienne of the resistance both she and Madame Manec participated in. She asks for “one ordinary loaf” from the baker, where inside it lies “a tiny paper scroll” full of “frequencies.”
PART EIGHT: 9 AUGUST 1944
WERNER
The novel flashes forward, back to the bombing of Saint-Malo, as Werner and Volkheimer discuss their pasts. Volkheimer admits that he was, “desperate to leave.” Desperate for the opportunity Schulpforta would provide him.
Werner reflects upon the “anger and righteousness” of German zeitgeist, and the boys at Schulpforta, “crazy for it.” The only one, Werner realises, who could “see through all that stagecraft” was his sister Jutta.
MARIE-LAURE
Marie-Laure remains trapped in the attic, as Von Rumpel searches for the stone throughout the house beneath her. Marie-Laure decides to broadcast herself reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
PART NINE: MAY 1944
WERNER
Werner faces the psychological consequences of the violence he has caused - “the floating child follows him through the countryside.” He sees a “dead girl in the sky, dead girl out the window…Two wet eyes and the third eye of the bullet hole never blinking.”
As they travel through Saint-Malo, hunting for “the Frenchman’s” transmission, Werner becomes shaken by his ethical choices. He hears the opening tones of Etienne’s educational broadcast and “the recognition is immediate,” he is transported back to a time where “the cords of his soul [were] not yet severed.” Werner “trembles with joy.”
It is on this basis that Werner decides to act decisively to protect what is precious to him. He realises that while Frederick told him that fate was inevitable, “in the end it was [he] who pretended there were no choices.” Werner recognises that he is the active participant “the same ravening nightmare recurring again and again.”
He lies to his team, and visits the house he triangulates from the transmission, briefly seeing Marie-Laure.
While he feels unable to communicate with them, he feels comforted by the independence of the first decision he has made in alignment with his own morals. “At least [I] protected the secrets of her house. At least [I] kept her safe,” he tells himself.
VON RUMPEL
Upon visiting the doctor, Von Rumpel finds that “the tumour in [his] throat…has grown to four centimeters in diameter.” He is given “maybe four” months to live, which further motivates his search for the stone in Saint-Malo.
MARIE-LAURE
As Marie-Laure leaves for “Hubert Bazin’s grotto,” having collected “a loaf” from Madame Ruelle, she is stopped by a German sergeant major who begins to ask her questions. Fearful, she hides within the grotto, “she crouches over her knees. She is the whelk. Armoured. Impervious.”
As she hides, Etienne realises that Marie-Laure is missing. “Thirty minutes. It should take Marie-Laure twenty one…Etienne hyperventilates…” Despite the emotional trauma that came with leaving the house, Etienne ventures outside for Marie-Laure, as “corpses stirred from the shadows….He twists the latch, opens the gate. Steps outside.”
PART TEN: 12 AUGUST 1944
WERNER & MARIE-LAURE
Werner listens to Marie-Laure read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He finds the narrative “strange and beautiful,” and he is struck by the terrible nature of her fate. Marie-Laure has the transmitter Werner “was supposed to fine,” their target in Saint-Malo, but in choosing not to kill her Werner has “saved her only to hear her die.”
As Marie-Laure, decides to play Claire de Lune through the transmitter, Volkheimer, touched by the music decides to risk the use of the grenade in order to break both himself and Werner free from the wreckage of the Hotel of Bees. Offering his rifle to Werner, Volkheimer leaves in search of food, as Werner moves to find Marie-Laure.
Upon finding Major Von Rumpel, Werner’s shot rings, like “the eruption of Krakatoa," the “house is briefly riven in two.” He explains to Marie-laure that when he was a child he would listen to Etienne’s lessons “with [his] sister.” The tangled web of fate, Doerr reveals, has connected them, across oceans, geographies and a World War.
In Etienne’s library, he finds Birds of America, the text which connects him to Frederick, through its “four hundred and thirty-five engravings” which sparked their shared intellectual curiosity.
As Werner guides Marie-Laure to the point where refugees congregate, he gives Marie-Laure a white pillowcase, urging her to use it to ensure she is not shot. Marie-Laure and Werner part ways.
Madame Ruelle finds Marie-Laure at a “requisitioned school,” and Etienne is freed from a “processing queue” at Fort National. Etienne and Marie-Laure decide to travel to Paris, in the effort to leave the aftermath of the war behind.
Werner, however, “is captured a mile south of Saint-Malo” and his health immediately deteriorates in incarceration. He understands that “his body is giving up.” In delirium he awakes in the middle of the night, walking out across the camp and triggering a “land mine set their by his own army three months before.”
Werner “disappears in a fountain of earth.” This fated burial, to be crushed under Earth, is one that he has feared since his childhood.
PART ELEVEN: 1945, PART TWELVE: 1974 & PART THIRTEEN: 2014
Part Eleven further reveals the consequences of war on the innocent. “Frau Elena and the last four girls at the Children’s house” work “in a machine parts factory,” and suffer at the hands of the Russians who assault them.
Hannah “screams for a half second but quickly muffles it,” as the Russians “slide off their trouser[s].” Jutta reflects on the “strangely orderly” nature of the violation she experienced - it is almost as if she has been rendered hollow by the repeated exposure to brutality and suffering, so much so that quiet compliance is the only reactionary measure she is capable of in the face of violence.
Both Etienne and Marie-Laure also suffer the consequences of war, as they travel their way across Europe. Etienne “sees soldiers with hollows in their cheeks like inverted cups,” and Marie-Laure can “sleep only two or three hours at a time.”
Where Part Eleven shows the immediate aftermath of World War II, Part Twelve brings some measure of closure regarding Werner’s death. Volkheimer’s visit to Jutta reveals more of the brief interactions Werner shared with Marie-Laure, as he says, “I think [Werner] might have fallen in love.” Jutta’s decision to travel to Marie-Laure and cement their connection brings together the remaining webs of narrative, as they discuss Etienne’s broadcasts which tied them together.
Part Thirteen provides a further note of finality to the novel, as Marie-Laure’s grandson Michel walks her through Jardin des Plantes. Marie-Laure quietly reflects on the passing of time, as she thinks “every hour…someone for whom the war was a memory falls out of the world.”