Werner And Marie-Laure Analysis

The swift fluidity with which Doerr moves between the stories of Werner and Marie-Laure and the parallels he creates between them emphasizes their shared humanity. As children, both Werner and Marie-Laure are depicted as innocent, with an element of ‘light’ within them, for they focus on the good in their lives- family, ambitions and dreams- despite the war. The fact that Marie-Laure is blind and motherless and Werner is an “undersized” (Doerr 24) orphan creates sympathy in the reader, especially as they are loved by other appealing characters - Marie-Laure by her father, great-uncle Etienne and Madame Manec, and Werner by his younger sister Jutta and care-giver Elena. Although separated by culture, gender, geography and even class, they are …show more content…
Arriving at her great-uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after fleeing Paris, Marie-Laure is welcomed with “eggs that taste like clouds. Like spun gold” (121) and canned peaches that are “wedges of wet sunlight” (121). The consecutive series of synesthetic similes in condensed form creates a sensory explosion of sight, taste and touch heightened with the repetition of the melting ‘w’ sounds. This emphasis on light has an almost religiously angelic quality- as if the light is her salvation. Being blind, she lacks the ability to understand the world the way most people do and so travelling such a distance and being removed from home would have been traumatic. Knowing this, the reader can truly feel her emotion shown in her ecstatic joy and hyperbolic description of seemingly mundane food. Werner, on the other hand, arrives in the same city and ends up trapped underground, as shells fall overhead and "the single bulb in the ceiling winks out" …show more content…
When Von Rumpel enters Etienne’s house to steal the diamond, Marie-Laure’s internal reaction is “Scream. / Die. / Papa.” (313). The one word sentences make it seem as if she is hyperventilating in terror and amplifies the pathos of a blind child screaming for her absent father- making the reader think about how war must be for a child. Like the modern reader, Marie-Laure cannot comprehend Von Rumpel’s innate greed for the diamond, a naïve point of view that is paralleled in Werner. He comments on prisoners “sleeping” (319) on a transport train; however, he soon realises “those are not sacks. That is not sleep. Each car has a wall of corpses stacked in the front” (319). He asks whether they were actually sitting on their dead and receives the reply from Neumann Two, “Bang. Bang” (319). Neumann Two’s sadistic qualities juxtapose both the reader’s and Werner’s shock and