All The Light We Cannot See By Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, is a beautifully written story capturing the lives of two ordinary children growing up in the midst of World War II. Doerr’s novel is told by a young French girl, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, living with her father, a master museum locksmith, in Paris. By the time Marie-Laure is 6 years old, she is fully blind. To help her learn to navigate around the city, her father creates a miniature version of Paris. He carves intricate houses so her fingers can trace along the streets.

Author of Memory Wall and About Grace, Anthony Doerr in his novel All the Light We Cannot See suggests that the less fortunate Germans during the 1940’s had little access to radio entertainment. He develops this claim by first explaining the intrigued looks on the children’s faces when Werner brings in the radio he had found buried in the dirt, then stating the radio’s condition being broken and non operating, then finally illustrating the distinct shift in the air as Werner got the radio to play even the smallest of sounds- specifically music. Doerr’s purpose is to describe the lifestyle of Germans during Hitler’s reign in order to give the readers a better understanding of the time period in which All the Light We Cannot See is written about.

All the light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, chronicles the lives and relationship between Marie and Werner, two children who grew up in France and Germany. The society around them forces discriminatory ideals that cloud their perception of the world, but they find its meaning through their own self-definition. In this, they are both guided by a single radio and the message and legacy that it contains. Throughout the book, the author isolated the two characters, but also created subtle connections between the two. The most important of which would be the radio. It created a bond between the two where they learned from each other’s experiences and struggles. All the Light We Cannot See recreates a new picture of the world by contrasting the two separate journeys taken by Marie- Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig to gain that image, which is guided by the power of a radio and the message it contains, ultimately leading to the meeting of the two characters that officially forms an image of the world where one’s actions are valued more than one’s physical features.

Night is a story that reveals some of the worst of the human race. It is a re-telling of a young Jewish boy, Ellie Wiesel, coming of age in the midst of the Holocaust. The book is quite short and very clearly written, but it is still a very hard book to read. The young boy who is also the author of the book makes us, the readers, accompany him through many in-human and near-death experiences. These are written in such detail that anybody taking the time to read the book will be left with an in-depth knowledge of what we as humans are unfortunately capable of and a desire to contribute in any way possible preventing this part of our history to ever repeat itself. This, I believe, is the authors goal, to teach us, make us aware through his own experience, and hence give us a reason to hopefully prevent it in the future.

He wants to show how even when he cannot see, he can still have an extremely specific and thorough picture in his mind. He adds figurative language so the reader has an even better illustration, and so he can show them how much he can still see while being blind. For example, he uses figurative language when he is describing the ocean and the waves he hears when he’s on the beach. “It roars over the sand dunes, arching across the complete audio spectrum as it follows the curvature of the coast. It seems to never run out of energy, and I have the impression that at any moment it could gobble up the land.”

The central idea of In All the Light We cannot See, written by Anthony Doerr, is that blind people are able to see their world in a different manner than people who are able to see. Those who are blind accomplish this by experiencing what others normally see through other senses that have remained intact. One instance where Doerr develops this idea is in lines 3-6, “Botany smells like formalin and old fruit; it is loaded with heavy cool jars in which float things she has only had described for her : the pale coiled ropes of rattlesnakes, the severe hands of guerrillas.” By using the words” things she has only had described for her” Doerr's is trying to convey the idea that blind individuals utilize their working senses to perceive the world

In the book, We Are Here, by Cat Thao Nguyen, she writes about the life of her family, the oppressive persecution they all suffered at the hands of the Communist government along with its new regime. This book portrays members of Nguyen’s family, their plight, during and after the Vietnam War, including, the struggle, during their escape, from Vietnam, via Cambodia, Thailand, then, Australia. In addition, it will establish that the Australian social structures of the day had the ability to dehumanise Vietnamese immigrants during the years of 1973 to 1980. The essay will also look at Geoffrey Blainey’s idea that the Indo-Chinese immigration was a middle-class idea, imposed, upon a vulnerable Anglo-Australian working class, which created

“I have been in a place for six incredible years, where winning meant a crust of bread and to live another day. Since the blessed day of my liberation I have asked the question, why am I here?” (Gerda Weissmann Klein). Life has never been easy, especially for Gerda Weissmann, former victim of the cruelty and terror beyond the barbed wire fences of the camps. Always shifting from camp to camp, Gerda Weissmann was a young Jewish lady who was forced to go through a heartbreaking and horrific experience at the concentration camps. The novel, All But My Life, by Gerda Weissmann Klein, is an autobiography that narrates her life in the German labor camps. The years she spent in the hands of the cruelty of the Nazis, did not enfeeble her, instead

Michael Clark suggests the author James Baldwin uses a theme of lightness and darkness to support the metaphors of childhood. Baldwin connects the culture of Harlem in the 1950s to lightness and darkness not only with childhood, but all stages of a person’s life. I believe Baldwin uses the motif to connect what one has learned as a child and transform those teachings and apply them within your adult life. During this time period, Harlem was flourishing with aspiring artists, writers and musicians. People in Harlem were free to create, explore and expand their ways of thinking. However, this freedom was followed by delinquency, crime and drug use.

Imagery is a visually descriptive language or a figurative language that is used in the novel to build crystal-clear pictures in which helping the readers imagine and understand obviously what exactly the author is trying to passage his or her words. Atwood uses this language technique to let the readers know what the narrator sees in front of her eyes. In the novel, Offred describes her limited room and surrounding during the shining day. She explains that:

“In a Dark time” by Theodore Roethke gives a retrospect into the inner turmoil’s of finding oneself through a haze of doubts in till reaching a moment of clarity. Each section of the poem describes a different emotion, or inner thought that spirals from fear of death, to emotions of desire. The use of imagery between nature and uncertainties of the narrator give a glimpse into Roethke’s own mind during the time he wrote this poem. Without hundreds of pages Roethke created a poem that connects readers to their own self-doubts and struggles of finding ones way again.

The quote "Character is what you are in the dark" - Dwight Lyman Moody has a few meanings. Mostly it means that you're different when you're alone. When you're around people they are influences of some sort. If you get into a situation when you're with people you might react differently than if you were alone, resulting in a different outcome. A lot of the time people aren't their true self around friends, or family, or whoever it may be for many reasons. A big reason is they don't want to be judged. Maybe they wanna look "cool" or get popular for something. Maybe they think they'll be looked at differently for being who they truly are. So basically fear of what others think keeps us from being who we really are. Fear can make us act different,

Put aside your stance on homosexuality, and put yourself into the shoes of someone who is a homosexual. Imagine how you would feel if the world did not accept who you are as a person because you are different. Only because you didn’t find the opposite sex attractive to you. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Everything is illuminated we find out that Alex confesses his love for Jonathan near the end of the book as he becomes more comfortable with Jonathan. Why does Alex not tell Jonathan from the beginning? Is he uncomfortable being open that he is a homosexual?

“Everything is Illuminated” has a mastery of literary standards, especially on syntax, figurative language and plot structure. For instance, Foer uses Alex fearlessly as a way to improve the book’s greatness, making him live the contradiction of having an English-related job, and yet he is unable to speak it and communicate correctly. Alex’s speeches and use of idioms are innocently funny. Furthermore, the story has a collection of letters exchanged by Alex and Jonathan (the Hero), which also helps to build the book’s theme. It is possible to affirm that such technique used by Foer might confuse the reader in the beginning, but once the plot develops, a deeper meaning is revealed – without the letters, all the moments, feelings, messages and

She makes an important point when trying to go beyond the female (otherness), by paying careful attention to differences among women themselves, and by putting emphasize on the multiple realties that women faces, and by that trying to uncover universalist interpretations (Parpart and Marchand 1995:6). She reveals the inadequacy of binary categories by showing us how power is defined in binary terms, between the people who have (men) and the people who do not (women). This is a consequence of seeing women as a homogenous group, and contributes to the reinforcement of the binary division between men and women (Mohanty 1991:64). By assuming that women are a already constituted group with the same experiences and interests, gender is looked upon as something that can be applied cross cultures (Mohanty 1991:54), and it also produces an assumption about the “average third world woman” as poor and uneducated, in contrast to the educated, modern Western women (Mohanty 1991:56). Implicit in the binary analytic lies the assumption that the third world woman only can be liberated through western rationality. Mohanty is making an important point when emphasising the need to challenge these objectifications (Udayagiri 1995:163).