Giant squid

The Giant squid is a dangerous creature in the episode of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that Marie-Laure reads aloud over the radio. Its attack disables the Nautilus and drives the crew to fight, while the broadcast’s arrival in the cellar makes the creature’s assault resonate with Werner’s own confinement beneath the ruins of Saint-Malo.

The Creature in the Nautilus Episode

Marie-Laure’s reading places the squid in a sequence of escalating dangers. The Nautilus crew first chops through icebergs that have trapped the submarine; after it travels north along the coast of South America and passes the mouth of the Amazon, giant squid pursue it in the Atlantic. One lodges its beak in the propeller, stopping the vessel and forcing Captain Nemo to emerge from his cabin after weeks away. The narrated crisis requires the submarine to surface so the crew can confront the creatures directly.

The reading gives the attack a collective, physical course: monsters climb the sides of the Nautilus, and the crew uses axes and other weapons against them. The squid are not merely distant dangers outside the vessel; their reach brings the conflict to the submarine’s hull and turns its crew into active defenders. The episode’s focus remains on the threatened crew and their response, rather than on the creature’s independent perspective.

The Broadcast in the Cellar

Werner listens to Marie-Laure’s account while trapped in a cellar with Volkheimer. Carrying the radio and its battery across the cellar, he finds Volkheimer in an armchair and places the headphones over his ears. Werner explains that Marie-Laure is using the transmitter he had been sent to find, and that the supposed terrorist network was actually an old man and a girl. The squid story thus reaches him through the very broadcast source he had discovered weeks earlier.

The transmission does not visibly rouse Volkheimer, who draws a slow breath but does not move. For Werner, however, the reading supplies language and images for the men’s situation. As rubble groans above them, he imagines himself trapped inside the Nautilus, deep underwater, with kraken tentacles striking its hull. The comparison connects the fictional crew’s confinement and attack to the danger pressing in on the men in the cellar without making the two situations identical.

Narrative Function

The Giant squid enters the main action through a story being read aloud, so its attack unfolds at once as an adventure narrated by Marie-Laure and as something Werner hears in real time. The text within the novel gives the crew’s danger a sequence—entrapment, pursuit, mechanical failure, and combat—while Werner’s circumstances give that sequence a second resonance. The radio carries not only the plot of the Nautilus episode but also an imaginative frame through which he understands his own confinement.

In Werner’s account, Marie-Laure’s French reading is strange and beautiful, though Volkheimer cannot understand the language. The squid episode therefore links a distant fictional crisis to the men’s immediate predicament while emphasizing the limits of their shared understanding: Werner can listen and explain, but Volkheimer gives no sign that he has understood.