So, my last three blog posts have been about the novel 'All the Light we Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr. I have summarized it, connected it to historical events of that time, and even connected it to our world today, but you're probably wondering what the big deal is. Why should you care about this book? Well, before we answer that question, I would like to refresh your memory of how this book ended. As you may recall, Jutta was traveling back to France with her son Max to return the little wooden house to Marie-Laure. Marie-Laure received the object, and all the memories that came with it. The Sea of Flames sits safely hidden in a grotto in Saint-Malo, Werner is dead, Von Rumpel is dead, Etienne is dead, Madame Manec is dead, Marie-Laure's father is dead, and Fredrick sits disabled in his Berlin apartment. Marie-Laure's twelve year old grandson Michel has just left her house after a visit. Now that your memory is up to date, back to the real question, so what? First of all, 'All the Light we Cannot See' was simply a beautiful story. It was well written, thought provoking, and heart wrenching. But more than that, it taught me that sometimes there is no way to escape you're hopeless or miserable state of life. Everyone is always saying that if you try hard enough, or believe enough, or work hard enough, you will find a way out, but sadly that can't always be the case. You see this progress through Werner's part of the story because at first he is stuck as an orphan in a mining town, destined to rot in the mines, with no money or family save his sister Jutta. "Werner Pfennig grows up three-hundered miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coal-mining complex outside Essen, Germany. It's steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes. Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slang heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld... Men brawl over jobs outside the Zollverein gates, and chicken eggs sell for two million reichsmarks apiece, and rheumatic fever stalks Children's House like a wolf. There is no butter or meat. Fruit is a memory." Then one day he thinks he has found a way out, Nazi training school where he has dreams of studying science and becoming an engineer in Berlin. But it is only after he gets there that this is no escape. His skills are used to hunt down and kill foreigners. The school tortures his friend, separates him from Jutta, and makes him sick. Everything in his gut is telling him to defy the very system that keeps him alive because it is evil, unjust, and corrupt, but that would mean death for Werner. There is no escape. You see this in a more literal sense towards the end of the book where Marie-Laure is trapped hiding in her attic with low supplies, while blood-thirsty Von Rumpel is in the house looking for her. Because she is blind, she does not stand a chance fighting him off, and if she stays in the attic she will die of dehydration and starvation. She is stuck, both options result in her dying, there is no escape. There is no escape for her uncle Etienne from the ghosts he sees due to his PTSD. There is no way for her father to escape prison. There is no escape for Jutta when the Russian soldiers come for her and her friends. There is no way out of the factory without them seeing her, and so they just wait upstairs for the inevitable. Anthony Doerr is constantly painting the picture for us that sometimes, and especially in war, there is no way to escape death or miserable situations. That really hit home for me because usually whenever I hear about the horrors citizens face in war and other conflicts I just think 'Oh, there's always a solution if you try hard enough for one.' or 'There had to have been a better way.' and things like that. But now I have this new perspective, and I realize that that is seldom the case.
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AuthorHi guys! I am an 8th grade student who loves to dance, read, and do anything outside. This blog might start to look like a hodge-podge of different things (and quite honestly it probably will be) as I will be using this for school projects, my own thoughts, dance, and basically anything else. Archives
May 2017
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