Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in All the Bright Places, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mental Health, Stigma, and Suicide
Community, Support, and Trust
Individuality and Identity
Language, Meaning, and Control
Grief, Trauma, Purpose, and Survivorship
Summary
Analysis
It’s a hot summer day. Violet parks on the side of the road and then hikes over the embankment to the Blue Hole. She dives in, looking for Finch even though she knows she won’t find him. She thinks of Cesare Pavese who killed himself in 1950 at the height of his career. Nobody could explain why he did it. Another writer remembered him as melancholy and as “a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams.” Violet thinks that could’ve been written for Finch.
Now, several months after Finch’s death, Violet seems to be in a much healthier place. Though she still wonders why Finch died (she seems to equate Finch with Cesare Pavese in that they killed themselves while they were full of potential), she realizes now that she’s never going to be able to answer these questions—and that she has to be okay with this.
Themes
Violet has written her own epitaph for Finch. It says that he was alive and then he died—but not really, because someone like him can’t die. Rather, he’ll become part of the legend of the Blue Hole, and he’ll always be there. Violet treads water and admires the sky. It reminds her of Finch, just like everything else does. She thinks of the places she’s going to wander.
The novel ends by suggesting that the best way to memorialize someone is to remember them. But even more than that, people who find themselves in Violet’s position should remember that they have the rest of their own lives to live—and that enjoying life is perhaps the best way to honor their loved ones.
Themes
