Long before the war begins, it exists as a rumor growing ever more persistent—a trap whose walls are closing in on the characters even as they try to convince themselves that it isn’t really happening. The war itself is an enormous trap, ensnaring everyone in one way or another, and smaller traps abound throughout the novel as synecdoches and metaphors for this larger one. The central characters develop courage and humanity as they work to free themselves and others from these traps, or they succumb to them, losing their humanity in the process.

Marie-Laure’s blindness, which develops gradually in her childhood from congenital cataracts, is an early example of entrapment. Her world becomes almost impossible to navigate: “Spaces she once knew as familiar—the four-room flat she shares with her father, the little tree-lined square at the end of their street—have become labyrinths bristling with hazards” (27). Where she could once find her way around her neighborhood alone, now she struggles to make it across a room without hurting herself. Her father’s patience and care, coupled with her own perseverance, allows her to escape this trap. He builds her a scale model of the city, which she studies with her hands until she knows it by heart.