Jim Wallace answers “meaning of title?”

Anissa Young asked this question about All the Light We Cannot See:

meaning of title?

Jim Wallace Whenever someone mentions Nazi Germany there's an automatic hate response in people. In “All The Light We Can Not See” Wefner is a young German. He is…moreWhenever someone mentions Nazi Germany there's an automatic hate response in people. In “All The Light We Can Not See” Wefner is a young German. He is also a part of the Nazi force. But you can not generate hate for this character. He's a gentle young man with kindness in his heart and if you've read the novel then you know it. And who can not love the character Marie-Laure, the blind French girl?… in her blindness, there's more light than we can see.

The novel wants to make the readers believe that there existed gentleness and kindness even during WWII. We can think up only the violence and when the word “World War II” strikes. Doerr takes our perspective away from all that and introduces a new theme, A German Boy helping a French Girl in the time when Germany and France are at war on all fronts. Yes, there's violence in the book, there's misery, of course. It’s World War II. But that's all the dark.

The book is about light. Here ‘All The Light’ should mean ‘All the good'. Marie-Laure and Wefner are the symbol for goodness in the novel. They are the rare rays of light that remain hidden to us. All these lights, that we could see…but we choose to overlook.
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All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr (Goodreads Author)

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