Pursuing The Light Of Humanity

Anthony Doerr is a famous contemporary American writer.All the Light We Cannot See is a novel written by Anthony Doerr with ten-year painstaking efforts.It caused a sensation as soon as it was published in 2014.Besides,it occupied the Book rankings of Amazon and New York Times for sixty-five consecutive weeks and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.This novel expresses the profound theme,that is,don’t die while you are alive.It is set in the background of World War II which is full of gunpowder.It describes an absurd and chaotic world of war.People live a miserable life of nothingness in such an irrational world.Although the world is absurd and life is nihilistic,people still have the freedom to make choices and actions,and actively seek the value and significance of life in pain.At present,most scholars at home and abroad have analyzed this work from the aspects of theme,ecocriticism,trauma,new historicism,initiation novel and so on.The innovation of this thesis is to interpret and study All the Light We Cannot See from the perspective of existentialism,and to explore how people pursue the light of human nature under the cruel war.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter one is the introduction,which mainly introduces the author Anthony Doerr and his work All the Light We Cannot See,the research status of this work at home and abroad in recent years,as well as the research significance and layout of this thesis.Chapter two is the theoretical foundation of the thesis,which summarizes the connotation and evolution of existentialism and Sartre’s existentialism.It mainly elaborates Sartre’s existentialism from three aspects: absurdity,nothingness and free choices.Chapter three discusses the absurdity of the world in All the Light We Cannot See.The novel is set in World War II,which destroyed people’s normal life.People’s living conditions are not ideal and full of absurdity.This chapter elaborates from two aspects,the chaos of the world and the irrationality of the world.Chapter four analyzes the nothingness of life in All the Light We Cannot See.Living in such a chaotic and absurd world of war,people can’t avoid the sense of nothingness.This chapter analyzes the protagonists’ painful consciousness and meaninglessness of life.Chapter five discusses the protagonists’ free choices and actions in All the Light We Cannot See in the face of the absurdity of the world and the nothingness of life.This chapter includes two parts,the first part is the men’s free choices and actions,and the second part is the women’s free choices and actions.Then it discusses the realization of the protagonists’ self-worth.Chapter six is the conclusion.This thesis creatively interprets All the Light We Cannot See from the perspective of existentialism theory.It enlightens people that we can’t change our origin and environment under the pressure of the painful and nihilistic life in the absurd world,but we still have the possibility of free choices and actions.The significance of life lies in our own choices,in that people bravely face reality and choose to find the true meaning of life in a positive way.We should have the spirit of never giving in and embrace life with passion and love.