THE BROKEN SYMPATHY OF DOERR’S UNIVERSE
Warning: Contains spoilers for All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” George MacDonald describes one of the fundamentals of writing an imagined world:
“[An author’s] world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws… Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church.”
There is a wealth of insight I cut out from between these sentences, so I highly suggest following the link I shall provide below to read the full work, whether or not you care for writing fantasy. After all, the principle MacDonald describes here applies to all fiction: no matter if the world is fantastic or mundane, there must be harmony with the world building, with the laws the author has established. This is my biggest issue with Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.
I have already described my issue with the forced supernatural element of the jewel subplot in my review, so I will only discuss that point as it relates to the main focus of this essay, which is that in his novel, Doerr implicitly builds a sympathetic universe only the break it at the novel’s end.
The concept of a sympathetic universe might sound alien to most in the modern west, but it’s actually quite common in stories. It’s the conception of the world as alive and in a sympathetic relationship to humanity. It reacts to our actions and feelings, like raining during a sad event. Disney has used this idea multiple times, with the clearest example being in The Lion King: when the good king, Mufasa, rules, the land prospers, but when the evil king, Scar, usurps the throne, the land dies and only revives with the return of the rightful heir, Simba. The earth itself responds to the actions of the characters and even “conspires” to bring them to their fitting conclusion.
This, of course, does not mean that evil cannot happen and bring people to ends they do not deserve. However, this evil itself unbalances the world and tilts it towards chaos, and in a sympathetic universe, the cause of the imbalance shall have that chaos returned back to him. Poetic justice is the judgement of a sympathetic universe.
In All the Light We Cannot See, hints of the world’s sympathy are most prevalent with the meeting between Marie-Laure and Werner. The world seems to be conspiring to bring them together from the start.
Werner becomes interested in radios because he and his sister find an old radio that he fixes up. They then come across recorded broadcasts from France that introduce the children to science. Their interest in the program encourages the children’s curiosity, and Werner continues playing with the radio in order to better understand it. His interest in radios leads him to becoming a Nazi soldier who uses his knowledge of radios to intercept illegal transmissions and locate their origin. His actions bring him face-to-face with evil, with his memories of the broadcasts as one of the tethers that keeps him human. Eventually, the reader discovers that the one who recorded the broadcasts was Marie-Laure’s grandfather and great-uncle. The radio that was used to broadcast them is then used to give information to the Allies on the German occupation of Saint-Malo, which eventually brings Werner to the city to find the informant.
Meanwhile, Marie-Laure finds herself as her great-uncle’s house after she and her father flee from Paris and their original refuge is found abandoned. Her great-uncle suffers from shell shock after fighting with his brother in WWI. After the Germans occupy Saint-Malo and her father is taken away under suspicions of conspiracy, Marie-Laure uses her nature as a blind girl to deter suspicion while she helps smuggle information to her great-uncle’s housemaid, who then helps transport it to the allies. When the housemaid dies of an illness, it is Marie-Laure’s desire to continue that prompts her uncle to rise out of his slump and keep the information operation going, using the radio to broadcast it.
Consider the series of events: Werner joins the German army to learn more about radios in part because of a broadcast sent out by Marie-Laure’s great-uncle; Marie-Laure flees to her great-uncle’s house from Paris, and because she is there he recovers enough of himself to use his radio to secretly broadcast information to the Allies; those broadcasts are then the very reason Werner comes to Saint-Malo, tasked with the job of locating the rogue radio. Things have come full circle. The world itself seems to be bringing these two together, to let them meet, even if just for a moment.
Adding onto this sense of conspiracy is the circumstances of their meeting. Werner has already found the radio broadcast, but after realizing that the voice sounds just like his childhood recordings, he lies and pretends he hasn’t found anything. That determination to protect the broadcaster is then increased when he finds the house, sees Marie-Laure leave it, and is smitten by her. Then, he is been trapped by an Ally bomb in a basement with his team. They are dying of thirst, reduced to drinking paint sludge to stay alive. Marie-Laure is trapped in her own house, hiding in the radio’s secret room while a cancerous German officer searches the house for the jewel said to grant invincibility to the one who carries it. They are both trapped, and Marie-Laure decides to broadcast the ending of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea while also saying how she is in danger. Then, as her last act of defiance against the one seeking her, she plays her great-uncle’s recording, which contains bits of the song Claire de Lune. Werner, who has been listening to the broadcasts while trapped, finds some desire for life in them and starts letting his friend and fellow soldier, Volkheimer, listen, too. After hearing Claire de Lune, Volkheimer, who loves music, then rediscovers his will to live, and he and Werner find the determination to try a deadly method of escape that ends up working.
Because of Marie-Laure and her great-uncle’s broadcasts, Werner doesn’t die in darkness, and because of that, he is able to come save her by killing the officer. The two then talk through the night, and he finds some healing in Marie-Laure, resolving to abandon the Nazis. They split so that Marie-Laure can seek sanctuary with the Allies, and Werner runs off after promising to reunite with her. The expectation is then that they will both survive and eventually find each other again.
However, this is not how Doerr concludes his novel. Instead, Werner dies soon after. This is not, inherently, an issue. Recall how I said that a sympathetic universe reacts to the characters’ actions and works to bring about a fitting, a poetic, end? At this point in the story, Werner has repented and begun to redeem himself, so a positive end would not be unfitting, but neither is death. He has participated in evil, even contributing to torture of one of his friends and the death of an innocent girl. He has thrown the world to chaos, so death is also a fitting end. The issue is not that he dies but how he dies.
Werner dies in ironic fashion, stepping on a German mine in a fevered state. This is not a death fitting for the established universe. Dying while trapped would be, since it was his job to trap others, but not dying by a mine planted by his own side. There is some foreshadowing to his death, as a similar event happened, where he stumbled into a mine field while fevered. In that instance, he miraculously avoided all the mines. There is some comparison to be seen, but foreshadowing does not make a death fitting, especially with the seeming miracle of his earlier survival adding to a sense of the world conspiring to bring him to Marie-Laure and his repentance. If his character arc had not played out how it did, then it might have worked, but Werner had already begun his path to redemption when he died. In fact, it’s precisely because he chooses repentance, rejecting the Nazis and abandoning their evil, that he ends up where he does, captured by the Allies, in a medical tent near a mine field. His death by stepping on his former allies’ mine that he did not plant, nor have any part in planting, is related to his choosing good. Lesson learned. Do not repent. Otherwise, you’ll die an ironic death.
There is some truth to the argument that he died because he saved Marie-Laure, as his fever might have been due to the likely leadened paint sludge. However, he could have just died due to the poison, killed by the very thing that helped him survive long enough to save an innocent life. It would have held some irony, but it could also be seen as him being given a chance for redemption at the cost of his own life. Again, this holds a sympathetic element to it. It would have been a fitting, if tragic, end. To die in an ironic manner, killed by the weapons of his own army after he has abandoned them, even by accident, as he stumbled into the mine field due to a fever, is a cynical death.
The cynicism is further enhanced by his sister’s gang rape by a group of Russians in the next chapter. It is a completely unnecessary event. It does nothing significant for her character, so there is not narrative point, and adds nothing thematically except to hammer in an idea that the world is a cruel place where there is no power guiding events. Everything is only accident. These two events throw the story into near nihilism. I believe this movement to be unintentional, as Doerr tries to bring some sort of meaning out of Werner’s death by the end. However, his attempts are too flimsy or made hollow by his own narrative and broken sympathy.
I have tried to think how he would justify these turns of events, and the best I can think is the jewel subplot. The jewel is said to bring misfortune to those its owner loves while keeping the owner from death. Since the jewel is in her possession for most of the novel, this could be used to try explaining how Marie-Laure survives so many events. It could also be used to explain how Werner survived the mine field earlier in the novel, with the idea of him being spared so that he can eventually save her, though I have issues with this interpretation that I will mention in a moment. Then, when she throws away the jewel and he, himself, does not take it, he dies. In this case, the jewel becomes a sort of twisted substitute for a sympathetic universe. However, not only does this seem to me a bit of a stretch, as it gives a soulless jewel a rather ridiculous range for its effects in both time and space, but the jewel as some magical orchestrater of their meeting doesn’t really work as their paths begins before the jewel even comes into Marie-Laure’s possession, when Werner hears the radio broadcasts. Furthermore, it still does not address the unfitting, cynical method of Werner’s death. Perhaps Doerr wanted some sort of supernatural mechanic to keep a sense of mystery in the story, a mysterious force that explains the coincidences that bring the characters together. But, as I mentioned in my review of the book, the jewel plot line doesn’t really fit thematically, doesn’t fit the world, and drags down the narrative. If he wanted to have a layer of mystery and magic in his scientific world, he already had it in the world itself, in the magical realism of his sympathetic universe.
Instead, Doerr destroys that sense of sympathy. When he then attempts to end on a more positive note, it feels false because of the ironic cynicism that came before. The laws an author establishes in his world need to be followed. The implicit laws of Doerr’s universe, the way his pieces fitted together, pointed to a natural world that holds some kind of mysterious sympathy with the people in it. A world that conspires with or against them depending on their past actions and current motivations. But Doerr breaks that sympathy, and in so doing, breaks his world.
Source(s)-
Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. Scribner, 2014.
Macdonald, George. “The Fantastic Imagination.” The Golden Key. www.george-
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