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All the Bright Places begins with a clear focus on life, death, and the struggle to survive. Violet and Finch, the two main protagonists and first-person narrators, seem to be losing their will to survive when they ascend the steps to the bell tower. Their chance meeting foreshadows the potential for friendship to ease their struggles with grief. Their individual internal struggles with grief are the main conflict in the novel, and also the tie that binds Finch and Violet together. The lives they lead prior to their initial encounter possess an undercurrent of the despair that torments them both, despite their numerous attempts to create coping methods to survive each day. Grief will also accompany them on every journey that they embark upon together, but as the action rises they will both seek very different ways to resolve it.

In the exposition, Finch shifts focus from himself to Violet as soon as she joins him on the ledge. It is clear to him that whatever her internal conflict is, she is not committed to the idea of ending her own life. As the action rises, the reactions of the other students highlight the disparities in their perceptions of how well Finch and Violet are coping with their internal demons. Violet’s friends express shock to find her there, while Finch’s friends have clearly seen this side of him before. The disparities between Violet and Finch begin to dissipate, however, when they embark on the Wander Indiana project together. Free from the oversight of their peers, teachers, and families, they are now on neutral ground where they can explore the parameters of their friendship, and later, their romance. As they wander together, the action rises in accordance with their growing feelings for one another rather than in response to their own internal conflicts. 

The author sets the wanderings firmly in the present tense, and primarily uses Finch and Violet’s first-person accounts to one another to divulge their stories, such as when Violet tells Finch about Eleanor’s accident, rather than relying heavily on flashbacks. Both characters are exceptionally articulate, even when engaged in the numerous and lengthy conversations with themselves. These interior monologues also take the form of Finch’s lists of rules, which shed light on his character as well as foreshadow his actions to come. Both characters use different methods of noting the time in each chapter, either marking the days since a significant event or counting the days until one. The actions that rise immediately before and fall immediately after the book’s initial climax, when Finch and Violet consummate their romance, are the only instances where time converges for them both. Each of them narrates a chapter with the same title, “The Day Of.” 

During this one perfect day that Finch and Violet first discussed in the exposition, they are both rooted in their past traumas but flowing back and forth between one another and toward new experiences, as in the Virginia Woolf quote that Finch introduces in Chapter 8. Violet will reference this quote again in the resolution when she is finally able to root herself in the present once again. After The Day Of, the narrators resume their diverse ways of looking at time as the action rises again toward the book’s main climax, which is Finch’s suicide. 

Prior to Finch’s final disappearance, details about the lives of minor characters move the plot forward or provide one of the main characters with insight into the other. The students who gather around the bell tower serve as a Greek chorus, a literary device that uses a non-distinct group of people who speak as if they share one voice, especially during tragic scenes. Many of the adult characters who appear in the exposition are not named either, which contributes to the notion that Finch and Violet are on their own. During Finch’s absences, the action rises as Violet expands her social circle and learns to trust the adults in her life. As she sees beyond their archetypes, Violet begins to give her parents and her peers more credit. Her newfound understanding of the importance of family and community allows Violet to depend on them for support and to process her grief over Finch’s death without being self-destructive, as she was when she grieved Eleanor. Because Violet narrates the final nine chapters, they shed no light on Finch’s despair in his final moments. In the aftermath of the climax, the action ebbs and flows as Violet discovers Finch’s clues and embarks on her solo journeys. In the resolution, it is Violet who defines Finch’s life as she thinks about the epitaph that she would write for him. In doing this, she reframes his life as one that lives on in others. Through this process, Violet resolves her internal conflict and triumphs over her own struggle to survive on her own.

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