The Book Thief Post #1

Aleks Czmut

So the book that I’ve been reading for the past few weeks is The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. The story follows a young girl named Liesel, in pre-World War II Germany, and then all throughout the war. What I find most interesting about this book is it’s narrator. It’s Death. The Grim Reaper himself narrates the book. First off, I want to say that that’s an interesting choice of narrator, but it fits, seeing the time of history that it it’s set in. Death narrating the story makes it seem very realistic, and gives a perspective that’s omnipresent and helps us to know, in a nutshell, that we can’t escape Death. Another thing that Death employs in his (its?) narration is that the entire time, death uses colors to describe the mood of the scene. For example, when Liesel’s brother dies, the colors that are present in the scene are red, white and black. Through Death’s eyes, the red is the blood on Liesel’s hands after she tears them on the snow (the white) in front of her brother’s grave. The black is represented by the first book the book thief steals: a black cover bound gravedigger’s handbook. In my interpretation, the red is a symbol of the love that Liesel had for her brother, the white is the innocence that she had, symbolized by the snow, which eventually melts and is lost. The black to me is the imminent shadow of Death, who always seems to be following Liesel. The colors also foreshadow the colors of the Nazi party, which although it exists, is not in supreme power yet.

I find it interesting how much of death’s narration includes colors. Perhaps it’s because he has such a harsh duty, that colors are his way of distraction. For example, whenever he begins to talk about Liesel, one of the first things he’ll describe is the color of the sky, or of her coat or someone’s hair. With that being said, I feel that in a scene, death usually describes one color, leaving the rest of the scene monochrome black and white. I like this kind of color scheme, because I feel like it describes the times well, that although the is shadow in our lives, there’s always a bit of bright to contradict it. I think that at a time like that when war is the shadow looming over Liesel’s life, its important for her to find little lights in her life, and for her, her lights are the books that she steals.

But the thing that I find interesting about Liesel and her book thieving is that she doesn’t know how to read very well, yet she’s determined to learn how to. I like how determined she is to learn how to read, and she has the means and resources to do so.