“A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.”
As the war arrives in France and Daniel and Marie-Laure LeBlanc flee Paris, Daniel awakes in the night to see this nightmarish image of his city being bombed. It seems to unreal to him that he momentarily sees it as an inverted image. This plays on the motif of light and darkness: the light here is “lurid, flickering,” and “bloodshot,” all indicating its evil nature.
“Werner was back in Zollverein, standing above a grave a miner had dug for two mules at the edge of a field, and it was winter and Werner was no older than five, and the skin of the mules had grown nearly translucent, so that their bones were hazily visible inside, and little clods of dirt were stuck to their open eyes, and he was hungry enough to wonder if there was anything left on them worth eating.He heard the blade of a shovel strike pebbles. He heard his sister inhale.”
This image occurs to Werner as he is being buried by the debris in the cellar from the bombing of Saint-Malo. The story of the dead mule is an allegory for his own fear of dying, starved, alone, eyes open but unseeing in the darkness; the image is visceral and almost nauseating in the way the clods of dirt are stuck to the mule’s eyes and the way he hears in the memory the sounds of the shovel and his sister breathing. It reflects on the current moment, where Werner is being buried similarly, while still alive.
“Her Majesty, the Austrians call their cannon, and for the past week these men have tended to it the way worker bees might tend to a queen. They’ve fed her oils, repainted her barrel, lubricated her wheels; they’ve arranged sandbags at her feet like offerings.”
The simile endows the cannon with the power that a Queen Bee has over her workers: all the work they do is for the purpose of honoring her. The context of the Queen Bee imagery is the hotel where the Austrian Detachment and Werner’s small unit have installed themselves. Underneath this simile lurks the theme of nationalism, as the cannon is working as a defense of the country, protecting what the Germans and the Austrians stand for in their devotion to a larger source: their country and its purity under the Reich.
“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
The motif of light and darkness and the theme of science are brought together here in the “Professor’s” talk on light and the way the brain works. What he says is a paradox, and yet it is true, which is what draws the attention of both Werner and Jutta. They cannot see the speaker, but he creates imagery for them, not only of how the brain is, but also of how light interacts with it; he creates for Werner and Jutta a magical world of science that they want to explore.
When Werner overhears Frederick’s mother say to a woman, “Oh, the Schwartzenberger crone will be gone by year’s end, then we’ll have the top floor, du wirst schon sehen,” he glances at Frederick, whose smudged eyeglasses have gone opaque in the candlelight, whose makeup looks strange and lewd now, as though it has intensified the bruises rather than concealed them, and a feeling of great uneasiness overtakes him.
Werner's doubts about his role in the war and the Nazis have been present from the very beginning, highlighted most by his sister Jutta's goodness/ethical purity. However, this is the moment where Werner realizes that the choices he is making are no different than the discrimination he sees in Frederick's mother's remarks about Frau Schwartzenberger; the same violence that harmed his friend Frederick, who in this moment appears to Werner with amplified injuries. Even in a scene that initially radiated comfort, luxury, and pride, fitting in with the theme of nationalism and purity, Werner's most humanistic side suddenly realizes that all of those things come on the backs of others who are being harmed.
Twist the chimney ninety degrees, slide off the roof panels one two three.
A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.
So, asked the children, how do you know it’s really there?
You have to believe the story.
She turns the little house over. A pear-shaped stone drops into her palm.
Puzzles are a symbol that appear throughout the book, reminding the reader of the light we cannot see: things are not always as they appear. Here, Marie-Laure discovers that the "dumb" model of Saint-Malo that her father left her, was part of an elaborate chamber constructed to hold the valuable diamond, the Sea of Flames. While Marie-Laure solves this puzzle, the theme of memory arises: she uses the memory she has of the first introduction to the Sea of Flames to convince herself of the intricate puzzle constructed around the Sea of Flames—literally in the form of the series of locks, but also figuratively in terms of the curse surrounding the stone.
Frederick said we don’t have choices, don’t own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet—I will not—Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. Werner who watched Volkheimer wade into house after house, the same ravening nightmare recurring over and over and over.
Werner realizes that Frederick embodies the theme of humanism: making decisions for the good of humans, out of kindness, and not out of conditioning towards a cruel goal of purity and nationalism. Werner realizes that he too can choose to act this way himself.
“She crouches over her knees. She is the Whelk. Armored. Impervious.”
The whelk in the novel is a symbol closely related to Marie-Laure; here, she embodies the whelk and she is in her "shell" of the grotto under the ramparts, protecting herself from von Rumpel, who waits outside.
The violins spiral down, then back up. Etienne takes Marie-Laure’s hand and together, beneath the low, sloping roof—the record spinning, the transmitter sending it over the ramparts, right through the bodies of the Germans and out to sea—they dance.
This quote features the themes of familial love and loyalty, as well as the motif of radio transmission. For Etienne, what has helped make him feel most alive is his relationship with Marie-Laure, as well as his ability to participate in the resistance specifically because of his talent for radio transmission.
To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.
The motif of vision and sight is an important part of the plot, specifically in the irony that Marie-Laure has the ability to "see" more than other sighted people This passage leads into an elegant series of images of things Marie-Laure can hear and feel both near and far away; she in fact, is able to "see" all the light we cannot. She sees the beauty, the quietness, and the humanity that others often miss.
