Summary
Part 10: 12 August 1944
148: Entombed
Werner listens to the girl read the story, in which the characters are trapped inside the submarine and they are worried they will asphyxiate. Then they travel north along the coast of South America, where they are attacked by a giant squid. Werner goes over to Volkheimer with the radio and places the headphones on his head. He says to him that he wishes he understood French, because it’s a strange and beautiful story. Werner admits that the girl reading is using the transmitter they should have found, and that Werner knew about it all along, and wants to know if Volkheimer knew. Volkheimer is silent, and Werner thinks he possibly cannot hear him through the headphones. Werner feels he saved her just to hear her die, as she begs for help. Werner takes the headphones back and continues listening to the narrative about the crews fight against the monsters.
149: Fort National
Etienne begs the jailers to let him go so he can look after his blind niece. He tells them his papers were seized and he is 63, not 60, but no one can do anything. They can see the city burning across the water. After the stray American shell strikes Fort National and kills 9 men there, Etienne is quiet; he convinces himself he can see his house still standing through the smoke. He has neither pillow nor blanket, and they aren’t given enough food. He fantasizing about escaping. They see and hear shells crashing into the sea. He thinks about how, during the last war, he knew men who could tell what a shell had hit by looking at the colors in the sky. He remembers listening to his first radio in Monsieur Hebrard’s workshop; his brother Henri’s voice, his parents, his house, all of it is burning now, he thinks. He looks at the fire and thinks that the universe is full of fuel.
150: Captain Nemo’s Last Words
Marie-Laure has read 7 of the last 9 chapters of TwentyThousand Leagues Under the Sea. After escaping the giant squid, the submarine goes into a hurricane, and later, Captain Nemo steers it into a warship full of men. She hopes she brought some comfort to someone by reading the story, like her great uncle or some Americans. She has heard the German shout in frustration twice downstairs. She considers going through the wardrobe and handing the diamond to him, wondering if that will save her. She wonders what would happen if the goddess removed the curse—if this would all go away, perhaps. In the book, the characters see a moment to escape, and they agree if they are caught they are going to defend themselves, together. She turns on the transmitter and continues reading, thinking of the whelks in the grotto, hiding, protected from the gulls that would pick them up and break them open on the rocks.
151: Visitor
Von Rumpel worries he has made a mistake. Perhaps the Sea of Flames was in the museum all along, or the girl took it with her when Claude Levitte marched her away, or the old man had it in his rectum. Or perhaps it was never a real stone at all. He was certain he had gotten rid of all the obstacles. He hears the voice of his father telling him he is only being tested. Outside, a German corporal calls out to see if anyone is there, and informs von Rumpel that the city is being evacuated, that the Germans still hold the Chateau and Bastion de la Hollande, but that all other personnel are falling back. There will be a ceasefire at noon tomorrow to get the civilians out, and then bombing will resume. He asks which unit von Rumpel is with; von Rumpel directs the corporal to continue his work, telling him that he is almost done.
152: Final Sentence
Werner has not heard the broadcast in over an hour, and assumes the last sentence he heard was the last line of the book, which stated that only the narrator and Captain Nemo know the answer to a question asked by Ecclesiastes: “That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?” He has felt deep hunger over the past days, but it seems to have left him now. Above him, Werner sees the Viennese girl in her cape, carrying a bag of withered greens. She floats down and settles herself in the rubble. She begins to list off offenses she committed, such as arguing over bread or not organizing her things according to protocol. He realizes she is Frau Schwartzenberger, the Jewish woman from Frederick’s building. The last item she lists is “for failure of imagination”—and Werner feels he is at the bottom, like the Nautilus sucked under the maelstrom, or like his father in Zollverein. The ghost comes toward him and turns into the girl again, with the black hole in her forehead, into which he looks and sees a dark city full of souls. Her hears thunder and lightening; his organs shake; the beams shake; he hears the slow breath of Volkheimer.
153: Music #1
Sometime after midnight on August 13th, Marie-Laure decides she will put the record on. She has survived now without water for a day and a half, and without food for two. She still has the one can, but she hasn’t opened it yet. She places it beneath the piano bench, where she will remember its location. She turns on the microphone and transmitter. She will turn the music up as loud as it can go, and if the German is still there he will find her. She begins to play the record. In her mind she walks a path in Jardin des Plantes, her father’s hand stretched out to her. She crawls to the top of the ladder and sits with the house in one pocket and the knife in her hand, thinking, "Come and get me."
154: Music #2
In the city, everything sleeps, except for the snails and the rats. Werner sleeps in the ruins, but Volkheimer is awake. He has the radio on his lap with the headphones, but only because it is where Werner left them and he doesn’t have the will to push them off. He is convinced the heads in the corner will kill him if he moves. Suddenly Werner hears music. As he listens to the music, he has a memory of walking in the woods with his grandfather. He puts the headphones on Werner’s ears, who identifies the song, "Clair de Lune." Volkheimer tells Werner to hook the light to the battery, and he does, before the song is even over. Volkheimer drags sections of wall out of the rubble, stacking them into a barrier, and then pulls the cord to light the fuse of the grenade, throwing it at the place where the stairwell was.
155: Music #3
Von Rumpel remembers his daughters as children: as fat babies who then grew to little girls, who would sing songs for him with lyrics whose meaning was too mature for them to understand. He sees Veronika marching a doll in a white gown, with another in a gray suit, down the streets of the model city; they are met by a third doll in black at the cathedral—he’s unsure if it is a wedding or a sacrifice. He hears Veronika singing softly, but it sounds more like piano. Somewhere above him a young Frenchman starts speaking about coal.
156: Out
For a moment, Werner cannot breath; the barrier collapses. But when he stops coughing, he sees Volkheimer staring up into a sliver of sky. Volkheimer goes up and clears the way, his hands bleeding, and they emerge into the rubble. Only two walls stand. Outside, there is only rubble and silence. Werner thinks of the nine men, or more, buried there in the hotel ruins. Volkheimer tells Werner to take the rifle and go. Volkheimer is going to find food. Werner moves through the city, thinking of the French girl whispering, “he will kill me.” He sees a building with broken glass and hanging signs. He thinks of Bastian telling him he would strip the hesitation out of him, asking who is the weakest.
157: Wardrobe
Von Rumpel wobbles in front of the wardrobe, holding a candle, seeing the decades-old boys' clothes inside. He sees the trails in the dust and hears the voice from the ceiling; he leans in to observe closer just as two bells ring, one above him and one below him. He knocks his head on the wardrobe; the candle falls, and he lands on his back. He wonders if this is how death will come. The candle rolls towards the curtains. Someone steps inside the house.
158: Comrades
Werner enters the house and treads over broken crockery. He climbs all the stairs and sees each floor littered with ash and broken parts of doll houses, paper, bottles, and cords. On the sixth floor the stairs end and there are three doors. He enters the one to the right, which is a bedroom. He wonders if he is too late. He props the rifle against the bed and drinks from the water. Behind him he hears a voice say “ah,” and he turns around to find a German officer, who looks pale and sick. He recognizes him from in front of the bakery. The way the officer smiles at him; Werner realizes he thinks they came for the same thing. Werner sees the fire of the curtain across the way, and mentions it to the officer. The officer talks instead about the ceasefire scheduled for noon tomorrow. He says he is the only one who knows where the thing is that they want, pointing his pistol at the ceiling and asking, "Is it up there?" Werner hopes the curtain fire will go out on its own. He thinks of the men with transmitters whom they killed, the looks on their faces like they had caught the tune of a familiar song. The German officer points the pistol at Werner’s chest. Suddenly, they both hear a clattering, something bouncing down a ladder, and the sergeant major’s attention goes toward the noise; Werner thinks to himself, “all your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”
159: The Simultaneity of Instants
Marie-Laure makes her way down the ladder, half-falling; pressing her ear against the wardrobe, she hears footsteps, hesitant, lighter than the sergeant major's. He opens the wardrobe door and she grips the knife tighter. The narration zooms out to Volkheimer, who sits by the sea in ruins, eating tinned yams. Then the narration switches to the wife of von Rumpel, who observes the good looks of an injured neighbor back from war. Then we see Jutta at Children's Home, then the führer eating breakfast, and then two inmates in Kiev. Then we see wagtail bird looking for snails to eat. Then we see young boys st Schulpforta waiting to receive antitank landmines, who will use them to defend a bridge in Russia and be killed by the tanks. Back at the wardrobe, Werner hears Marie-Laure inhale inside, and asks, in French, “es tu la?”—"are you there?"
160: Are You There?
Werner says to Marie-Laure that he hears her on the radio and he isn't there to kill her. The narrator says that all of us came here as a single cell, multiplied, and became beings. Marie-Laure comes out of the wardrobe; she tells Werner she cannot find her shoes.
161: Second Can
Marie-Laure sits in a corner with her heels tucked underneath her. Werner watches her movements, trying to make sure he remembers her forever. He says there is a ceasefire at noon, and she asks if he is sure; he is not. She asks what day it is; he does not know. He brings her water from the other room, where he tries not to look at von Rumpel's body. He tells her he used to hear the broadcasts on the radio. She tells him it was the voice of her grandfather. She goes up the ladder and brings down the can; she asks if Werner can tell what it is, but it has no label. He opens it, and the sweet perfume of peaches fills the air. She tells him she will share, as thanks for what he did. They devour the peaches; Werner feels like it's a sunrise in his mouth.
162: Birds of America
Werner is fascinated by all the books and wonders in the house, and he's fascinated by Marie-Laure. Marie-Laure shows him the transmitter and the old record that has her grandfather’s voice. He asks her if she thinks that Captain Nemo survived the maelstrom; she says she doesn't know but she hopes so, because even though he was crazy she didn't want him to die. Werner finds the Audubon book of birds, the same one Frederick had, and asks if he can keep one of the pages. They know they need to go to lower ground, so eventually make their way down to the cellar. The floor booms from 30 bombs dropped miles away. Werner imagines how to prolong this moment, what their life would be like in 3 or 10 years when they could live in France or Germany and leave the house and eat at a tourist restaurant. Down in the cellar, Marie-Laure asks him if he knows why the man upstairs was there; he says he doesn't know, but suggests he might have come for the radio. And she says that perhaps that's why. They both fall asleep.
163: Cease-fire
Werner wakes first; the shelling has stopped. He watches Marie-Laure for a moment, then wakes her too. He finds her a pair of shoes in the house, and they stand at the doorstep, not sure of what is on the other side. He thinks of the entrance exam where he had to jump from the platform. They go outside, the streets smoking. He begins to see other civilians leaving their homes with suitcases and children. At one intersection Marie-Laure asks the street name, then takes him down a series of streets to the grotto, which she unlocks and enters with him. He tells her they need to leave, as the other civilians are leaving. He watches her touch the walls as if she were greeting old friends. She takes a small wooden object out of her pocket and places it in the water. She asks him to confirm it is the ocean, and that the object is in the water. He leads her out to the streets, and points her in the direction where he believes the collection point is. He tells her to walk that way holding out the white pillowcase he took from the house. She asks if he can come, but he knows it will not be good for her to be associated with him. She can't see him, but he feels he can't bear her gaze. They say goodbye, and she places something in his hand. He watches her walk away before opening his hand—an iron key is inside.
164: Chocolate
Madame Ruelle finds Marie-Laure in the old school where they are keeping refugees. The Americans have boxes of confiscated German chocolate, and they both eat more than they can count. A day later, the Americans gather the Frenchmen at Fort National. Madame Ruelle pulls Etienne out of the processing line, and he hugs Marie-Laure. The next day the Americans, gas the last German hold on Saint-Malo, and the Germans raise the white flag. When people are permitted back in the city, Madame Ruelle goes in to check in her bakery, but Marie-Laure and Etienne travel on to Rennes, where they rent a hotel room and separately take 2-hour hot baths. That night Etienne says to Marie-Laure that she can show him Paris.
165: Light
Werner is caught a few miles south of Saint Malo by French resistance fighters who initially think he's an old man because of his white hair. They later turn him over to Americans who have set up in a hotel. He is worried they will take him down to a cellar, but they take him upstairs instead. He is interviewed through an interpreter; he tries to ask about Marie-Laure, but his comment is brushed off. He thinks of Marie-Laure, of all of the details of her, and worries he will wear the images out. He is brought into a holding area with other Germans, but Volkheimer isn't there. Werner eats the soup that night, but later is sick. In the morning he also cannot keep the soup down. They are marched east to join a larger group in a warehouse. Medics try giving Werner gruel, but it won’t stay in his stomach—the last thing that stayed down were the peaches. He wears Marie-Laure’s uncles tweeds, and thinks of her with longing. He has a fever; he knows if he does not eat he will die, but when he eats he feels he will die. Later they are marched to Dinan. Many of the prisoners are young boys or older men, unknown to each other, all of them having seen things they wish to forget. On September 1st, Werner cannot get out of bed, and is taken to the medical tent. He stays there for a week, clutching his duffel in one hand and the little wooden house in the other. He figured out how to solve the puzzle of the house, and thinks it is very cleverly built. Other men in the tent are dying. In English the nurse and medic talk of his fever and how he won’t eat. In dreams he sees the miners’ lanterns; he sees Jutta inside a submarine. One night he sits up in bed and sees clouds in the sky outside of the tent flaps. He sees Frau Elena by a stove, with an infant Jutta nearby; he feels the webbing of Marie-Laure’s fingers against his own. He hears Volkheimer’s voice saying “What you could be.” He gets up out of bed. Werner remembers a time when he and Jutta built a boat; when they put it on the water it was swallowed by the current, and he told her they would build another. Now he tries to remember whether they actually did. He walks outside into the moonlight. Across the field an American watches a boy leave the tent, and he tries to stop him; however, when Werner reaches the edge of the field he steps on a landmine planted by his own army months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.
Analysis
Part 10 contains the climax of the novel: Werner is trapped and is looking for a way to get out, and Marie-Laure is trapped in the attic hiding with the Sea of Flames; at the same time, Werner listens to Marie-Laure read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on the radio. In Marie-Laure’s protective shell of the attic, the motif of the whelk as Marie-Laure is demonstrated. In fact, she uses her imagination to conjure imagery of her snails in the grotto who are also protecting themselves by hiding there so that gulls do not cause them harm.
The motif of vision and sight was brought in with Werner’s ability to see in the dark in Part 8, and now Volkheimer too is beginning to see through the darkness, albeit in a delirious way, believing the white heads he can see will kill him. Thus, he too is haunted in his own way by what he has been a part of. Unlike Werner, who is motivated by his guilt and his desire to save Marie-Laure, Volkheimer is paralyzed by his. He is sitting, unmoving, with the radio on his ears. He has given up hope—until he hears the music from the radio.
Marie-Laure’s belief in the Sea of Flames curse is apparent when she wonders what would happen if the goddess removed the curse. Like her father, she was initially skeptical, but the chaos around her seems so much like a curse. However, Chapter 141 also reveals that Etienne did survive the shelling of Fort National, and thus there is still hope that perhaps Marie-Laure is not cursed.
The narrative of Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax is being told in parallel to the rising climax of the novel, as both Werner and Marie-Laure struggle to survive; the characters in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Marie-Laure, and Werner are all trapped and facing obstacles to their survival. Yet, both Werner and Marie-Laure make it out of their respective traps alive; in contrast, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ends in a question, where neither the reader, nor Marie-Laure, nor Werner knows what the fate of Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax were as they went into a maelstrom.
Chapter 152 is called the Final Sentence, which has multiple meanings. The first is the literal meaning: the final sentence of the book that Marie-Laure finished reading, which has left Werner wondering what happens to the characters. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ends on a question from the Bible. This part of the Bible discusses the limits of human wisdom. In addition to the Final Sentence of the book, Werner also sees the apparitions of the Viennese Girl and Frau Schwartzenberger. The Viennese girl, who received her final sentence of death at the hands of Werner’s unit, and he has been carrying her with him in a ghost form ever since. In regard to Frau Schwartzenberger, her fate is unknown, but as this apparition she lists off a series of offenses that would have been offenses she was accused of in a concentration camp; thus her appearing is a symbol for all the Jewish people killed at the hands of the Nazis, and Werner is charged with this guilt as well. As he looks into the hole in the head of the little girl, inside he sees the souls of millions of people, the victims of the genocide he participated in by being a part of the Nazi army. The final sentence of the offenses Frau Schwartzenberger apparition lists is “for failure of imagination”; in contrast to the power of imagination, which has allowed Werner to escape the terrible reality around him, and which has also allowed him success in his pursuit of science and technology, Frau Schwartzenberger has not been able to use imagination as an escape. Werner at this moment feels as if he too is in the bottom of the sea: he parallels the experiences of Captain Nemo and of his father, dying in the coal mine, metaphorically completely crushed by the darkness he has participated in.
The climax of the novel occurs when Werner escapes from the cellar and goes to save Marie-Laure from von Rumpel. Finally, he has a chance to make the humanist choice of choosing his own destiny, acting outside of his duties but in the nature of kindness and compassion for another human being. Humanism is defined by Merriam Webster as “a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason.” Doerr has said that his novel is a humanistic perspective on how people can be kind in spite of the circumstances. Werner’s saving Marie-Laure is the ultimate act of humanism portrayed in the novel: that of a character whose ideals are supposedly completely opposite of another’s, but who acts out of love and kindness toward the other regardless.
Marie-Laure and Werner thus have the moment of meeting that the entire novel has been leading up to, Werner is in love with Marie-Laure, and Marie-Laure sees in Werner more than just a Nazi soldier: she sees a boy who came to save her life, a kind soul, someone with whom she wants to share Madame Manec’s peaches. Despite Marie-Laure’s blindness, Werner too detects that she can see into him, which is why he can't bear her gaze as he leaves her to go to safety while he has to stay behind.
Part 10 mysteriously ends with Werner stepping on a land mine; the reader at this point knows that Werner went into the grotto and collected the wooden house, and that he knows that it opens as a puzzle, which he thinks is clever. However, the suspense is built around where the Sea of Flames is: does Werner have it, and if so, how is it that he steps on a landmine? Is the protection of the stone real or fake? And if he does not have the stone, where is it?
