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9. 7 August 1944
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in All the Light We Cannot See, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
World War II, the Nazis, and the French Resistance
Interconnectedness and Separation
Fate, Duty, and Free Will
Family
Science and “Ways of Seeing”
Summary
Analysis
In the Hotel of Bees, the soldiers have a dinner of pork and tomatoes. They know that the Allies will bomb them at any moment, but also know that there’s no point in running away now. Werner can only think of the young woman who lives in Etienne’s house. As he thinks, the other soldiers report that the Allies have dropped leaflets from the skies, telling the inhabitants of the town to depart immediately.
The meal between Werner and his peers has a sense of being a “last meal”—as if the soldiers can sense that they’re going to die in the bombing tomorrow. The chapter then ends with the image of leaflets—the title and subject of the book’s first chapter. In this way, the novel comes full-circle, and one timeline finally catches up with the other.
Themes
