The Room on Rue Amélie

Charlotte is a young Jewish girl who is Ruby’s neighbor when the war begins. She is a dynamic character who grows from an impressionable young girl to a mature young woman who “might as well have been twenty-five” for all the hardships that she has faced (437). Her character arc illustrates The Experience of Identity and Coming-of-Age.

At the beginning of the novel, the stigma against Jews is only beginning. Charlotte comes of age right at a time when Jewish people are having their rights taken away, which gives her a complicated experience of her Jewish identity. She faces taunting at school before having to be homeschooled to avoid bullying, and she and her family eventually have to register themselves as Jews and wear yellow stars on their clothing (See: Symbols & Motifs). The family’s persecution reaches its crisis point when Charlotte’s parents are arrested and sent to a concentration camp; Charlotte is the only family member who escapes, with Ruby taking over as her guardian.

Charlotte grows in confidence and her sense of self the longer she lives with Ruby. Her growing sense of independence puts a strain on her relationship with Ruby: Charlotte is mature enough to understand the reasons for Ruby’s choices, yet resents them because she doesn’t feel trusted or valued. Charlotte eventually persuades Ruby to let her join the Resistance, which enables Charlotte to take on more responsibilities. After Ruby is taken away, Charlotte is left to carry on her work in the same way Ruby carried on for Marcel. She also develops her emotional maturity through her deepening relationship with Lucien.

In the final chapter, Lucien’s narration reveals that Charlotte survived the Holocaust and lived out her life in America with her new family. She and Lucien married and adopted Ruby’s daughter Nadia, thereby maintaining a lifelong connection between the group of friends even after Ruby and Thomas’s passing. Charlotte represents the Jewish people who survived the horrors of the Holocaust and built new lives while still carrying their traumatic memories within them. The novel ends with Charlotte and Lucien in a poppy field, representing the endurance of their love and their connection to Ruby and Thomas.

Thomas is the third point-of-view character in The Room on Rue Amélie. He serves as a fighter pilot in the RAF: While people like Ruby work for the war effort behind the lines, Thomas serves on the front lines as part of the army. Thomas is just starting his training as a pilot when the novel begins, eventually developing from a nervous recruit to a confident pilot in complete control of his weapon. In this way, his growth parallels Ruby and Charlotte’s more internal development. Apart from Ruby, Thomas’s most prominent relationship is with his mother. Although she’s never seen on the page, she appears in Thomas’s memories and attitude toward her. Once Thomas enters the war effort, he makes vague, far-off plans to visit her, not knowing that their time together is running out. Her death teaches him not to take the future for granted and to appreciate the time that he is given. He takes this lesson with him into his relationship with Ruby, allowing him to live fully in the moment without being weighed down by the future or the past.

After he leaves Paris, Thomas returns to the war with a new sense of purpose. He begins to view victory not as a broad, sociopolitical concept but as a way to build a future for himself and the woman he loves. He dies right as the war ends when his plane malfunctions. His final vision—of Ruby in a poppy field—occurs at the same moment that Ruby dies while envisioning Thomas in a poppy field, thereby linking them to one another even at the moment of their deaths.

Lucien is unusual in that his only point-of-view chapters are the opening and closing chapters, and in that his point of view is delivered in first person rather than in the novel’s standard third person. Within the primary storyline, he doesn’t appear until approximately halfway through the novel; however, he has a significant impact on Charlotte at a pivotal time in her life.

Lucien is young, like Charlotte, but has been exposed to more of the war effort and grown more experienced as a result. He took over his illegal forgery work from his father, carrying on the subversive battle against oppression just as Charlotte does in assisting Ruby with the escape line for pilots. Initially, Ruby is suspicious of Lucien, seeing him as someone she would have been warned against in her youth. Ironically, this is an inversion of Ruby’s previous snap judgment of character when she fell in love with Marcel. Like Marcel, Lucien goes on to disprove her first impression: He proves himself to be a strong and responsible figure in Charlotte’s life, and he is the one who steps in to care for her when Ruby is no longer able to do so. After the war ends, he marries Charlotte and adopts baby Nadia, moving to America to begin a new life with his family.

Lucien also acts as the novel’s framing device, laying the story’s foreshadowing in the first chapter and revealing what happened beyond the events of the story in the last chapter. His devotion to his wife is very clear, as he continues to care for her in the present-day timeline of 2002 when they are both elderly. He represents the endurance and resilience of love in the midst of crisis.