Comparing 'Werner And Marie-Laure'

Early on when she is newly blind due to the cataracts that formed in her eyes life is very difficult for her. “What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin . . . [Marie’s] only sanctuary is in bed, the hem of the quilt at her chin . . .” (Doerr 27). In his kindness, Monsieur LeBlanc meticulously carves a model city for her to learn how to find her way around safely. Due to this kind act Marie is now able, with her father accompanying her for safety, walk around her neighborhood. Later on when they are forced to flee to Saint-Malo where some of their relatives live, Marie and her father walk the entirety of the journey and again, Marie has to depend on her father’s guidance to help her make the journey safely. “‘Marie, I see a hotel.’ ‘You said the hotels were full.’ ‘. . . Come. It’s not far.’ Again [Monsieur LeBlanc] carries his daughter. One more half mile” (Doerr 110). Even though she can sense something is not going as planned with their trip, she allows her father to carry her and believes that he will bring her to Saint-Malo safely. Marie’s faith in her father, although she is blind, allows them to arrive safely in Saint-Malo where they can stay safely through the duration of the

Marie-Laure and Werner find themselves frequently struggling to make proper choices, while also facing the possibility that their actions don’t amount to anything, reinforcing their insignificance in a grand scheme. Free will is symbolized by the Sea of Flames, as the likelihood of a curse indicates that attempts to protect one another are futile and yet if it’s just a silly myth, actions towards one’s loved ones do matter. In the initial chapters, Doerr seems to apply a clear distinction between free will and fate, as the two main characters seem to have the option to shape their destinies as they please. However, as the novel unveils, these terms become more intricate. When admitted to the National Institute, Werner wishes to maintain his morality but goes along with the barbarous activities due to his fear of disobeying. As he comes to realize, free will can be challenging -even painful. Although faced with significant adversities to exert their free will in a time of war, both characters are able to retain some level of independence as a result of strong family relationships. Marie-Laure’s love for her father encourages her to enter the French Resistance and resist the German soldiers in Saint-Malo. As for Werner, he acknowledges how Jutta “always seems to recognize what is right” and how “she’s the only thing keeping him from surrendering totally.” (Page 263). Family, both in the story and real life, is the source of free

Jeanne is riding in the first trip to their new home. The trip is quite wild and disorderly due to Papa’s state of drunkenness. When they reach their destination, the family is in a state of apprehensiveness. They fear the worst possible situation. Luckily, everything remains normal, the people are indifferent to them. Unfortunately, it

He develops a passion for fixing and building radios, which allows to him to work at the Hitler Youth. While he is there he becomes friends with an interesting boy named Frederick, who loves birds. Werner learns many important lessons from Frederick. Later, he works on a special assignment to track the resistance, which Marie Laure and Etienne start after Madame Manec dies of pneumonia. When the Allies started dropping bombs in Saint Malo, Werner gets trapped in the basement of a hotel with his team, while Marie-Laure takes shelter in Etienne’s cellar. After the bombing stops, Marie-Laure comes out to drink some water, but immediately goes back and hides in the attic, when she hears Von Rumpel come inside the house to look for the Sea of Flames. After staying in the attic for many days, she starts to broadcast from the radio and and says, “he’s here.” Werner hears her broadcast and realizes that she is in trouble and that he needs to save her. After he escapes from the basement, he finds Marie-Laure’s house, kills Von Rumpel, and helps Marie-Laure to safety. After they part their ways, Werner gets arrested by the Allies and gets very sick. While he is sick, he walks out onto a minefield, and dies from an explosion. Many years after the war, Marie-Laure walks to the park with her grandson and reflects on her life and

1. “Villefort started in spite of himself. The coincidence shook his usual impassivity and struck a chord of sympathy in the depths of his soul. He, too, was about to be married; and he had now been called upon to destroy the joy of a man who, like himself, was on the point of attaining his supreme happiness”(Dumas 25).

In early scenes of the book, it described the childhood life for Marie-Laure (main character) and Werner (main character). Werner and his sister, Jutta, spent most of their childhood listening to a broadcast of French scientists on the radio. As time passed, Werner excelled in math and was forced to work for the Nazi Party in tracking transmission waves in order to find anyone who had illegal radios (172). During one of his missions in Saint-Malo, he found Marie-Laure’s broadcasts of her reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Werner listened to Marie-Laure’s broadcasts every night for comfort and while listening one night, Werner noticed that, “She stop[ped] reading abruptly and the static roars. When she speaks again, her voice has become an urgent hiss: He is here. He is right below me” (393). This was very unusual for Marie-Laure’s broadcast to stop so suddenly

In addition, Marie’s braveness comes out the way she deals with Sister Leopolda who is an old grizzled nun with an uncanny sixth sense for the presence of the devil. When Marie arrives and starts taking classes, she faces total opposition from Sister Leopolda. Sister Leopolda sometimes sniffs devil out of the dark corners of her classroom. Marie spends time performing chores for the nun but Sister Leopolda teaches her that she will always struggle to keep the devil out of her heart. Marie’s success at the convent is dependent on her relationship with Sister Leopolda. For Marie, her struggle against the nun is a larger than life; battle of good versus evil. Marie believes that she stands out from the rest of the students. What begins as Marie’s fear of the devil’s influence becomes a more complex understanding of how a fear can coexist with desire. Sister Leopolda soon becomes a stand in for the devil as she and Marie face off with each other. At first, Marie is abused only mentally by Sister Leopolda, but later on she is physically abused. For example, one day Sister Leopolda stabs Marie through the hand and

Now even though Anne Frank and Gerda Klein were different people and they had different personalities, their lives had things in common. For example, They were both taking to a concentration camp and they were both planning what they were going to do once they were saved. They both had high hopes for their future, like Anne wanted to be a great writer who would be remembered even after she died. Both of their friends either died or were killed at the concentration camp. They were both surviving on little or no food for years. Gerda was a human skeleton when she was found by the american soldiers. These were just a few of the major similarities that I found.

In conclusion, Marie and Meursault showed many similarities and differences in mannerism, action and emotion. This statement was easily expressed by Meursault’s mind thinking, “It occurs to me that anyway, one more Sunday, was over, Mamam was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that nothing had really

Marie-Laure Leblanc, a blind girl whom had to flee from Paris with her father, quickly learned how to adapt to a new town and eventually led to experience the war alone as a young blind girl. Marie-Laure’s story ends up corresponding to Werner Pfennig, a young orphan boy from Germany, whom has a huge fascination for radios. During the war Werner is in charge of pinpointing and destroying opposing German radio broadcasts. Towards the end of the novel the two characters ended up meeting one another through one of the radio broadcasts and despite of all of the challenges throughout the novel they were finally able to see the good in one another.

Then, in chapter twenty-two, at a trading fair, people who had a grudge on Simon, Jeanne’s husband, start to try to attack him with a knife. After this incident, their house is then surrounded by “Indians” and start to attack the Jeanne’s family. A fight with the Iroquois then makes Simon’s arm is wounded by an arrow and he goes delirious. Months later, some more “Indians” go and attack their house and their dog and another friend of theirs dies. Jeanne has to hide in their cellar for three days while their house is burning down until she comes out. This shows just how living in New France puts the Filles du Roi in critical danger, and therefore treating them badly. Secondly, the Filles du Roi are not treated well because they live in horrible living conditions. On the boat ride to New France, the Filles du Roi are only given rancid water and dried biscuits as food for 44 days. These are not the healthy and pleasant living conditions those women deserve.

Both Daniel LeBlanc and Ed Boone are responsible for the development of their children’s sense of selves, along with their perception of the world. Marie Laure’s confidence through her disability stems from the relationship she has with her father. In spite of being blind, she is independent in her role throughout the novel and this is possible as an effect of her relationship with her father. With only a year’s experience of being blind, Daniel gives Marie Laure the task of navigating her way home unassisted. The exercise is repeated for months with

Due to war, the characters within All the Light We Cannot See were restricted and forced to lead to an unfulfilling life where evil triumphed. Maries-Laure, a blind girl living in France, was uprooted from her home in Paris, and with her father, traveled to the Island of Saint-Malo for safety. On the journey, her father had to carry a precious gem with him for his work, and because of the gem, he later had to go back to the museum in which he worked. During the journey back to the museum he was captured by the Germans and never seen again. Marie loved her father and felt lost without him. Frederick, Werner’s friends at the Nazi boarding school, was inevitably stripped of all his goodness too. Within the Nazi school, Frederick was the only boy who was “pure”. He did not conform to the Nazi rules and, instead, had a passion for birds. He was so kind that he would refuse to help torcher a prisoner of war by not throwing a bucket of freezing water at the prisoner during one freezing night. When people at the school bullied him for being a good person, he never retaliated. Because he never retaliated, he became seriously injured and his mental state became seriously impaired. Werner had a bright future as well. He was smart in the areas of math and science; he had a talent constructing radios. But, due to war, he had to use

She witnesses firsthand all of the hardships the French commoners are enduring and it fuels her rage and anger toward the nobility. Madame Defarge channels all of this anger into exacting her revenge, but we cannot help pitying her for her wretched childhood. We comprehend the reasons behind the madness, but that does not justify her actions.

When characters are placed in different situations, they tend to reveal their true identities. In most cases setting is used to identify a characters true characteristics or intentions. The purpose of this is to entertain the plot of the story. As the story moves on, characters are not necessarily changed but more over presented in different characteristics that the reader had not seen them in before. “Helene Wright was an impressive woman, at least in Medallion she was.” (Morrison, 11) Respected by many in Medallion because of her physique, when presented in a new setting, Helene was stripped away by one word, “gal.” A simple change of place, proved that Helene was not different than the other women in Medallion. The highly admired woman was now lowering herself from the “lady” image she had obtained by being coquette to a white conductor.