Marie-Laure's Bombing

“‘You’re leaving. Aren’t you, [father]? ‘I won’t be long, Marie. A week. Ten days at most” (Doerr 189). Little to his knowledge, he will not come back to Saint-Malo in a week like he thought, but he will be detained and questioned about the diamond as if he were a criminal, leaving Marie to take care of it for much longer than expected. When he gives the diamond, secretly concealed inside of a model house, to Marie he does not know what is going to happen to himself, but he knows she is the person he can put his faith in to take care of it. Marie holds true to taking care of the diamond for her father, even to the extreme extent when she is threatened over it, because she understands the great faith her father put in her. During the time Monsieur LeBlanc spends in the prison he continues to express the faith he has in Marie keeping the Sea of Flames safe when he spends time praying for her. “Every hour is a prayer for Marie-Laure. Every breath” (Doerr 197). Through all of the uncertainties of if he will ever even get to see Marie again, Monsieur LeBlanc remains completely certain that he chose the best person to take care of the diamond and that Marie will always make wise decisions regarding its

Once Werner and his crew had arrived in Saint Malo, he intercepted one of Etienne’s broadcasts of coordinates and announcements. Immediately, he recognized “the tenor of the voice matching in every respect the broadcasts of the Frenchmen” which brought memories of his childhood with Jutta. At the end of the broadcast, Werner heard Clair de Lune, a song by Debussy, and was entranced like he was again a little boy discovering the mechanisms of radios for the first time. He made the decision to not turn these broadcasters in, thus sparing the Frenchman named Etienne and Marie-Laure who was the niece of the Frenchman. After killing many innocent people, Werner spared many lives by this action, and in a sense, this worked to rectify his wrongdoings. While trapped under the Hotel of Bees, Werner had only a broken radio and the remaining members of his crew, took time to reflect upon his actions since his departure from home. He was haunted by many of his actions and felt he did not deserve redemption. Even in recognizing the wrongs he had committed, Werner was able to redeem himself; he acknowledged what the war had done to him and his deplorable actions. Werner fixed the broken radio and was able to intercept the transmissions of Marie-Laure reading from Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Sea while Rupert von Rumpel, a dangerous German private, was rummaging throughout her house. While listening one night, he heard her say that “[von Rumpel] is here. He is right below [her] (393)”; after hearing Marie-Laure, Werner makes the decision to save her. After Werner rescued Marie-Laure, the two go their separated ways and Werner is captured. Even though Werner did not experience a physical reward, his actions of saving both Etienne and Marie-Laure worked to rectify the wrongs he has

Werner’s view of the war was that it was real and it was his only way to get out of working in the mines, unlike all the other boys his age. On page 116, Werner is at a Nazi training camp in Schulpforta and he remembers what was said to him and Jutta back in Zollverein at the orphanage, “Exceptional. Unexpected. We will only take the purest, only the strongest. The only place your brother is going, little girl, is into the mines” (116). Back in Zollverein, Werner never thought that it was possible for him to get out of going to the mines, but he made it to Schulpforta. Furthermore, Werner yells, “Heil Hitler!” (116). Werner screaming “Heil Hitler” shows that he is in support of Hitler and the war. On the other hand, Marie-Laure was in denial about the war. On page 97, Marie-Laure is hiding in a room from the bombings that are happening outside, “She smells smoke and knows. Fire. The glass has shattered out of her bedroom window, and what she hears is the sound of something burning beyond the shutters.... ‘Ce n’est pas la réalité’” (97). Even with all the commotion of the fire and the broken windows, Marie-Laure still tried to convince herself that everything that was happening wasn’t real. When she says, “‘Ce n’est pas la réalité’”, that translates into: it’s not reality. By Marie-Laure saying it’s not real, it goes to show how much in denial she is

Marie-Laure’s setting is almost synonymous with who she is. Her setting is ever changing with the destruction of the city and the coming and going of the people in her life. Marie-Laure does not remain a static character. Marie-Laure evolves and develops herself with these changes into a round character who is capable of withstanding and adapting to many events. Werner’s setting provides structure but ultimately confines him. It is not until the explosion at the Hotel of Bees that Werner is also able to explode from the perception of who he has led many to believe and reveals to Volkehimer and Von rumple his true self. The setting mirrors the struggles and chaos of the main characters and enhances the journey and development of who they become by choosing to exercise their free

Within his book, Anthony Doerr focused on two main characters, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig. Marie-Laure was a blind French girl who lived in Paris with her father, who was one of the only people who treated her as a normal person and considered her disability an obstacle she could be able to conquer. He helped her develop skills to manage her condition in various ways such as making her wooden models of their neighborhood to be able to navigate the streets, and teaching her braille. Marie-Laure was very dependent on her father and his assistance, and when they moved to Saint-Malo where he was arrested and taken to a German prison, Marie-Laure was left hopeless and devastated. She began helping her great uncle, who she lived with, and his housekeeper, Madame Manec, with the French resistance group they were organizing.

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

The event that I chose was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City by an ex-Army soldier and security guard named Timothy McVeigh. He parked a rented Ryder truck in front of the building loaded with a powerful bomb made out of a deadly cocktail of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other chemicals. The bomb went off at 9:02 a.m. When the smoke cleared the area looked like a war zone. Half of the building had been reduced to rubble, surrounding cars were incinerated and nearby buildings were damaged or destroyed. The death toll was very devastating: 168 people, including 19 children were killed that day not to mention several hundred more injured in the blast. The bombing was considered the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history (fbi.gov).

As he is introduced, the author tells us that Werner is an orphan that lives in poor conditions. He is very intelligent and teaches himself to fix radios. Werners skill becomes popular which catches the eye of a wealthy man. This leads to the man helping Werner get into a very high class school; and eventually being put in the army to track radio signals. Werner was not used to the harsh conditions in which the school and war contained. To be able to keep going and try his best, he was forced to tolerate the conditions. For example, Werner learned to deal with the cruelty of his associates such as how they bullied the weakest members in the

On Monday, April 15, 2013, two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, detonated a homemade bomb near the Boston Marathon killing three people and maiming dozens others. Tamerlan, the older brother died in the process leaving Dzhokhar to answer for the heinous crime. Critics are advocating that the surviving bomber, being a US citizen, should have been read his rights before extracting any information from him. Granted that Tsarnaev, a US citizen 's Sixth Amendment of the Bill of Rights were violated, his citizenship became questionable when terroristic acts were committed against America. Because the FBI and law enforcement agencies’ first and foremost agenda was to keep Americans safe, answers were needed immediately to determine if there were plans for bombing other U.S. cities, and they made the most logical decision within the context of the law to react quickly by delaying Tsarnaev’s Miranda Rights justifiably.

Allied strategic bombing of Germany during the Second World War was, in the main, significant. The key themes to be looked at in this essay are the effects that Allied Strategic Bombing had on the dislocation and demoralisation of German civilians; Germany’s economic ability to produce and transport goods for the war effort; other key aspects of the war and the German war effort and, finally, its impact on the USSR. The evidence of the effectiveness of Allied Strategic Bombing of Germany strongly suggests that it became more significant throughout the war, especially after the first one thousand bomber raid on Cologne in May 1942, and although not decisive on its own, was significant in the final outcome of the Second World War.

Marie-Laure is reading “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” speaking into the radio, so others on the receiving end can hear her. As Werner steps into the house after freeing himself from the rubble, he steps into Marie-Laure’s house. This allows Werner to meet Marie-Laure, and save her from Von Rumpel. Werner and Marie-Laure eat together as they have become friends. Marie-Laure is saved by Werner, as he tells her to hold a white flag and run.

The main characters in All The Light We Cannot See are, for the most part quite separate from each other. The only connection that exists between Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig before close to the is Werner’s veneration for the scientific radio program produced by Marie’s grandfather and great uncle. In fact it is this veneration which causes Werner to turn a blind eye when he hears “the quality of transmission and tenor of voice matching in every respect the broadcasts of the Frenchman he used to hear” (406) over his radio scanning technology. Werner decides not to inform his superiors of what he had discovered and instead uses his radio scanning technology to locate the source of the broadcasts. It is during this process that Werner first encounters Marie.

Hello Jen, Sorry I haven't written in a while. I am on page 134. I am really enjoying the short chapters and I love how Doerr jumps from Marie-Laure to Werner's story. It is interesting to see how (their quite different) lives are unfolding alongside one another. I obviously have been very nervous for both characters since the beginning though, but I am now worried for Werner in different ways. I fear that he will be brainwashed by the Nazi's ( his sister already recognizes this of course) and that something is going to happen to his sister while he is away. Although I also like reading it from their point of view.

The symbolism of the radio keeps playing an important role as more chapters come and the story slowly unveils. After the death of Madame Manec, Etienne and Marie-Laure decide to take up her resistance efforts by participating in forbidden radio broadcasts because they view it as the right thing to do, the necessary thing to do. As for Werner, it’s just the opposite. Werner has convinced himself that he’s finally reached what he’s always wanted by catching illegal transmissions and using his knowledge for the benefit of others, but the reality is that there’s a reason to why he keeps feeling uncomfortable inside. Werner still thinks , “Out here in the forests, in the mountains, in the villages, they are supposed to be pulling up disorder by

It narrates the story from the perspective of a young girl who gets married to a rich old Marquis and goes to live with him in his castle in France. The castle is situated in the bosom of the sea “with the seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day” and “at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago (BYB117).”3 The solitude and the mysteriousness of the castle is further heightened by the rumbling of the sea wind in all its rooms and