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Veronika Lorenzana
Mr. Jesse Martinez
INTR 101
October 14, 2015
Making Visible the Invisible
Seeing a live presentation from and meeting a Pulitzer Prize winning author is
something that I likely would have never been able to experience outside of a
college setting. After reading and thoroughly enjoying the novel All the Light We
Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, I was afforded an amazing opportunity to hear his
perspective on what went into drafting the book and the details behind certain
characters and events he chose to include in his writing. Reading the novel
combined with Doerrs presentation and our class discussion really helped me to
create a more solid interpretation of the story.
In All the Light We Cannot See, we learn about a story of how two fictional
characters meet under coincidental circumstances. Werner and his sister Jutta are
growing up as orphans in Germany where Werner eventually gets recruited to work
as a radio mechanic for the German Army. In Paris, a different story of a young blind
girl named Marie-Laure unfolds as she and her father flee the seizure of Paris. MarieLaure and Werner are about the same age, and as we hear each very different side
of their stories, they eventually find each other through a common medium which
ends up being a radio transmission that Marie-Laure is sending out through an attic
in her grandfathers home. Their time together is brief, and Werner sends her away
to safety shortly before he gets sick and dies by stepping on a landmine. MarieLaure survives and makes a life for herself, and she crosses paths with Jutta several
years later to learn what came of Werner, where the story ends.

There was a lot of research that went into creating Doerrs realistic and
historically-accurate work of fiction. In our class discussion, we learned about the
history of the time period that the novel is set in. Hitlers rise to power and the order
in which he seized various countries played a big part in the
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story line. The details Doerr uses to describe the people and events in the story help
to make it an engaging historical journey. In the discussion, we also heard the many
different viewpoints that classmates took on various ideas and events in the novel.
We talked about the significance of the Sea of Flames and what its presence in the
story really meant. We also talked about how Werners death and the unhappy
ending to the novel helped to make it a more touching and relatable story, since
what happened in the novel is fairly representative of what happened in a lot of
peoples cases back in World War II.
In his presentation, Doerr talked about his fascination with radios and the
concept of communication. He wanted to incorporate and re-instill the magic of
radio communication in his audience which he achieved by creating the characters
of Marie-Laure and Werner, whose use of radios motivated Werner to escape an
entrapment of rubble and eventually lead to him save Marie-Laures life because of
this connection. His detailed accounts of both Marie-Laure and Werners situation
were such that one could not help but feel an intimate connection to the radios in
the story line; after all, without the radio Werner would have lead Volkheimer to
Etiennes home where both she and her uncle would have been killed.
In addition to using the radio as glue for his story line, Doerr also wove
subjects of his own fascination into the book. He talked about his own collections of

stones and pebbles around his room as a child and how he was always interested in
rocks and gems of all kinds. He loved the ocean as well, and he gave these
characteristics to Marie-Laure. Her being blind and having the love for such things
added a lot of depth and imagery to the story when Doerr describes her experience
on the ocean, or what she experiences when touching minerals, shells, snails, etc.
When she visits the grotto with Crazy Hubert Bazin, Doerr uses phrases like a
curved wall which is completely studded with snails and hundreds of
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tiny, squirming hydraulic feet beneath a horny, ridge top when describing a sea
star (pages 259-260). He gave Werner his love for heavy questions of the universe,
making him a bright and curious child with aspirations to do much more with his life
than just to join the workers at the mine. Werners interest in learning why things
work started him as a young mechanic, inventing a carrot-slicing machine, a pulley
system, and a trap alarm among many other things in the book. Doerr writes:
what he loves most is building things, working with his hands, connecting his fingers
to the engine of his mind. Werners curiosity lead him to become a self-taught
expert on radios and gave him an out from his orphaned future as a mine worker. In
essence, Marie-Laure and Werner are loose molds of what Doerr was like as a child.
Finally, Doerr talked about the title and main message behind his book. All
the Light We Cannot See is meant to be a literal statement of all the radio waves,
communication waves, and different frequencies of light that are invisible to the
naked eye. Especially now with the advancements of communication, every single
one of us are in a constant cloud of invisible light and sound waves that are capable
of connecting us in ways unimaginable just a century ago. This cloud of invisible

magic is what Doerr really wanted to capture when he wrote this novel. It was the
magic of this cloud that ultimately lead Werner to Marie-Laure, and his connection
to her late grandfathers recordings on science and other worldly topics is what
saved her life.
Reading and enjoying the novel was a treat in and of itself, but being able to
hear the authors inspirations and goals of the novel was an experience that I am
truly grateful for. I had some of my own loose interpretations of what of his
intentions were with different aspects of the book (the legend of the Sea of Flames,
the oddity of Volkheimers character, killing off Werner), but it was eye-opening to
hear my classmates interpretations of the story and also hearing first-hand what
Doerr had to say. I have
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often been amazed at how authors and screenplay writers are able to come with
such beautiful and elaborate stories out of thin air. While Doerr conducted a lot of
research and used a non-fiction, historical background as the setting for his book,
his characters were for the most part entirely fictional, though not far off from what
actual people from that time might have been like. The novel took him ten years to
complete, and he mentioned having to rethink certain aspects and themes in the
book as present-day technology advanced around him. It was also refreshing to
learn that his two main characters had so much in common with his younger self
and that he basically inspired himself for the novel even though some other factors
contributed after he found what would be the main theme and setting. All in all,
Doerr did in fact re-instill the luster of the radio, creating an oddly romantic yet
realistic war story around it, but also leaving us with an appreciation for the radio

and its contributions to communication as we know it today; or as Doerr might have

put it: allowing us to appreciate all the light we cannot see.