“Before Your Eyes Close Forever”:
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
There is a stone called “the Sea of Flames.” It is “a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas” with ”a touch of red at its center, like flames inside a drop of water” (20). Centuries ago, a prince plucked it from a stone from a dry riverbed in Borneo because of its beauty. The legend goes that “[t]he keeper of th[is] stone would live forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortune would fall on all those he loved one after another in unending rain” (429). It is said that this stone is inside a vault at the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where Maurie-Laure’s father works as the master locksmith. Maurie-Laure, a girl who has been blind since she was six years old, is not sure if she wants to believe this.
Marie-Laure remembers the first time when she was able to find her way home without her father’s help:
Right. Then straight. They walk up their street now, she is sure of it. One step behind her, her father tilts his head up and gives the sky a huge smile. Marie-Laure knows this even though her back is to him, even though he says nothing, even though she is blind – Papa’s thick hair is wet from the snow and standing in a dozen angles off his head, and his scarf is draped asymmetrically over his shoulders, and he’s beaming up at the fallen snow (41).
Daniel LeBlanc always found ways to create a safe world for his daughter.
When Germany invades France, Marie-Laure and her father go to stay at her great-uncle’s house in Saint-Malo. In the attic of Entienne’s (Maurie-Laure’s great-uncle) house is a radio transmitter. When Entienne was young, he and his brother, Henri, used to broadcast their own recorded programs for children on the radio. When Henri was killed in the Great War, Entienne came home and built his own radio transmitter so he could broadcast the recordings again. As he confesses to his great-niece, Maurie-Laure, “…I wasn’t trying to reach England. Or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me” (161). When Maurie-Laure asks, “You’d play your brother’s own voice to him? After he died?…Did he ever talk back?” he replies that “No…He never did” (161). Even though Entienne could not reach Henri, he is able to reach two children in Zollverein, Werner and his sister Jutta.
At the orphanage in the coal-mining town of Zollverein, a boy named Werner and his sister, Jutta, listened to the radio as a man with a velvety voice told them: “Open your eyes…and see what you can with them before they close forever” (48-49).
Once, Jutta asked Werner, “Is it right to do something only because everyone else is doing it?” During WWII, Werner found the opportunity to do what he believed was the right thing.
<Works Cited>
Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
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