Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is both a treasured book and a continuing act of connection in the life of Marie-Laure LeBlanc. Etienne LeBlanc gives her its two volumes in Braille for her sixteenth birthday; she reads passages aloud to him in Saint-Malo and, during the siege, sends the story over the radio. The novel’s submarine journey thus becomes a shared world for people separated by war, while its mysteries give shape to questions the book’s characters cannot answer about their own lives.

The Birthday Gift and a Return to Reading

On the floor outside Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s bedroom, a large parcel wrapped in newsprint and twine waits for her. From the stairwell, Etienne LeBlanc announces her birthday; inside are two volumes of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The gift carries particular weight because three years and four months have passed since her father left Saint-Malo, and nearly four years since she last read Braille. Yet the raised letters return readily to her memory. She opens the book on the floor and begins again from the first page, moving through the opening chapters as the familiar story comes back to her.

That first rereading establishes the book as more than a new possession. Its words reconnect Marie-Laure LeBlanc with a skill and pleasure that have been absent for years. She remembers the premise: worldwide curiosity about a supposed sea monster, Professor Pierre Aronnax’s effort to discover what it is, and the encounter that brings Aronnax and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land aboard Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus. Knowing what lies ahead does not make the pages redundant. The returning story gives her a path into reading again, and she is eager to follow it from the beginning.

A Shared Voyage in Saint-Malo

Marie-Laure LeBlanc reads the novel to Etienne LeBlanc during the months when the Americans draw nearer and the German position frays. The wartime routine is starkly measured: each morning brings news of the changing front, while each afternoon the two continue through part two of the book. They have entered unfamiliar territory together, following Professor Aronnax farther into the Nautilus’s voyage and wondering where it will go and what will happen next. The reading creates a regular practice inside a life marked by danger and uncertainty.

On the afternoon of 6 August, Marie-Laure LeBlanc reads a passage about whether Captain Nemo has left the Nautilus and whether he might be carrying out a secret mission. She closes the book before continuing. Her attention has shifted to the last letter she received from her father, whose message directs her to look inside Etienne LeBlanc’s house. The juxtaposition is precise: the novel’s question about a hidden mission gives way to the real mystery of her father’s instructions. The book does not solve that mystery, but its language of secrecy and absence sits beside it as Marie-Laure tries to understand what has been left unsaid.

The novel also gives the pair a way to defer an ending. When Marie-Laure LeBlanc counts nine chapters remaining, she resists reading ahead because she and Etienne LeBlanc are making the journey together. She returns instead to an earlier chapter, rebuilding the world out of the raised dots. At this point the book is not simply a plot to finish; it is a shared activity whose continuation depends on Etienne’s return.

The Broadcast Beneath the Ruins

On the morning of his fourth day trapped beneath what remains of the Hotel of Bees, Werner Pfennig tunes a repaired transceiver and hears a girl reading in French. The voice reaches his good ear through static. He initially suspects that hunger and fever are making him imagine speech, but he keeps listening as the reader narrates a scene from the Nautilus’s voyage beneath ice. The passage’s danger—being trapped between walls of ice—unfolds for Werner inside his own entombment. A fictional predicament and his immediate confinement occupy the same broadcast, without becoming the same story.

The reading is interrupted when Marie-Laure LeBlanc stops and urgently warns that someone is below her. The signal then disappears. Werner searches the bands, finds nothing, and tries to rouse Frank Volkheimer, who does not respond. The broadcast has offered Werner a human voice and a narrative to follow, but it has not brought him an explanation or an easy rescue. Its sudden cutoff makes the distance between reader and listener palpable: she cannot see who has heard her, and he cannot reach her through the radio.

The book returns to the airwaves on 12 August. Marie-Laure LeBlanc has read seven of its final nine chapters by noon. The Nautilus has escaped the giant squid, encountered a hurricane, and carried Captain Nemo toward the last pages of his voyage. She cannot know whether her broadcast has comforted Etienne LeBlanc, other people sheltering in cellars, or American soldiers listening at night. The uncertainty preserves the broadcast’s importance without turning its reception into a certainty: she sends the story outward, not knowing who is there.

An Uncertain Ending, Remembered

Before reaching the novel’s end, Marie-Laure LeBlanc pauses over the Canadian harpooner Ned Land’s chance to escape. The escape is dangerous, and he expects to defend himself if caught. This passage arrives while Marie-Laure is weighing her own danger and keeping a knife beside her. The novel’s peril therefore resonates with her circumstances, while remaining a story she can choose to read and a sequence she can control by turning—or closing—the pages.

Later, Werner Pfennig asks whether Captain Nemo survived the whirlpool. Marie-Laure LeBlanc answers uncertainly: she cannot settle the question, and suggests that making the reader wonder may be the point. She regards Nemo as a madman and still did not want him to die. Her response refuses to reduce the novel to a definite outcome. It holds together judgment of the character and attachment to him, much as the broader story holds together fear for the people at risk and the inability to know their futures.

The novel persists in Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s memory beyond the immediate readings. In a later scene, she sits in her laboratory and touches Dosinia shells one by one; among her memories are her father’s trouser leg, sand fleas, and Captain Nemo’s submarine vibrating with its mournful dirge in the dark. The book has become part of a private store of remembered experience. Across birthday gift, shared reading, wartime broadcast, and recollection, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea joins imaginative travel to real separation: the Nautilus carries its readers elsewhere, but its unanswered questions keep them attentive to the uncertain world they must return to.