All The Light We Cannot See Mood

A Play on Words

Every single word that an author uses, can and will impact the overall outcome of a novel. Along with that, an author’s written tone provides the reader with the emotions and attitude of the writer/character. A word’s connotation, an idea or feeling a word invokes, can be one of the most important factors to writing a story. A common theme that should be noticed in all of these ideas in improving word choice, is how the reader will react and understand to what you wrote. In the book All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr had to make a variety of choices regarding where the story would be set, how the plot or action would be ordered, and how the characters are introduced and developed. The setting of World War II correlated perfectly with the plot of a boy and a girl trying to survive devastation. For example, the second you open up the novel, you learn that the characters are being manipulated by World War II. Anthony Doerr’s decision to use World War II as the time period, added on to the intense landscape of the novel. “It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be

After the conclusion of every chapter there would be a shift toward what is going on in the other character’s life. Furthermore, after we have read both of the character’s perspectives, we would jump to the future which would usually talk about what is occurring in World War II. Although, sometimes the characters will try to see into each others perspectives like in the following quote. “And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.” (34) Basically, there are constant flashbacks and flashforwards throughout the novel, which I believe have a negative impact on the overall outcome of the