Meaning of the cover

[Hibah]

About halfway through the book, I closed it and just stared at the cover. I do not know why, but if I stared at it long enough I saw a single raindrop coming down towards an ocean. Now that I think about it this makes sense. The raindrop is symbolized Marie's and Werner's life story and the ocean is the town. Their life falls and falls until it hits the ocean causing it to ripple. The ripples spread outward until it has reached the corners of the town and it is life changing for Marie and Werner. For Marie, it was the moment the colors faded away and she went blind and for Werner, it was when he got accepted for the academy of Hitler Youth. What did you think of the cover

[anthonywang]

I believe the meaning of the title is a metaphorical suggestion that there are countless invisible stories still buried within World War II — that stories of ordinary children, for example, are a kind of light we do not typically see. Ultimately, the title is intended as a suggestion that we spend too much time focused on only a small slice of the spectrum of possibility. The light in its title is, among other things, a topic that Werner hears discussed on a late-1930s radio broadcast about the brain’s power to create light in darkness, “The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?” (Doerr 48) It’s an idea that reverberates ever more strongly as the book progresses. That the professor speaking on the radio turns out to be Marie-Laure’s grandfather just adds to the elements of felicity and coincidence that enrich this narrative. And the way Werner’s school so brutally tests his decency threatens to snuff out any of the light that made him such a special boy. Even allowing for the kill-or-be-killed values beaten into cadets at the place, Werner lets himself be seduced by the power newly bestowed upon him. He does nothing to stop the system that elevates him from destroying his best friend. In my opinion, the meaning of the title poses as the big picture that there are bigger things in life than just one small sliver we focus on.