As we delve further and further into The Book Thief, we take for granted many aspects of the book that must have either caused Markus Zusak a lot of stress or just came naturally to him. One of those aspects is how a multitude of literary devices is subtly interwoven with the plot of the story and the language of the book. Similies and metaphors appear in the text regularly as do personifications, the most powerful of which is the transformation of our own narrator Death with a large number of personifications. The two most notable instances of these transformations are Death's Diary and The Long Walk to Dachau.
Death's Diary makes a number of appearances throughout the book but the most powerful instant is when it first appears at the beginning of Section Six. The diary mostly consists of Death's complaining but we can really see Death's true feelings about his own job and his reactions to the catastrophic events that plagued the first half of the twentieth century. The thing Death wants most right now is a break. He simply wants to be able to relax and let someone else do his job of collecting the millions of souls from the people that die on a regular basis. But he can't. There is no one else with his abilitiy to be anywhere and everywhere at once and so he can't take a break. He can't do anything except work harder when massacres, wars, and famines take the lives of millions of people. He is amused by the humans' imagery of himself as a scythe wielding shade of terror when in reality he is just the delivery boy from Earth to another place. His reactions to these really establish him as human and make him closer to the reader.
Death doesn't take the same sort of tired and frustrated mindset in The Long Walk to Dachau. What he's doing is fulfilling his duty as a narrator, giving an unbiased view of what is happening at this point in the story. He (?*) gives an accurate portrait of what the Hews walking through Molching are. Pitiful, living, walking corpses, nearly dead with hunger and fatigue and the humiliation of simply being who they really are, Jews. They're being assaulted and ridiculed for absolutely no good reason and Death does a spectacular job of conveying all the feelings and atrocities that have been heaped on the European Jews.
Markus Zusak does an incredible job of transforming Death from something inevitable that many people fear into a person that many people can relate to on a variety of different levels, if it's complaining about a dead-end job or discussing major historic events. Zusak may be relating this transformation to Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s, transforming his image from a lowly Nazi party member to one of the most powerful men in the world. Zusak's transformation of death however is from a looming, almost scary prospect to just something that should happen naturally and automatically.
*Is Death male or female? A child or adult? What proof is there of your opinion?
Death's Diary makes a number of appearances throughout the book but the most powerful instant is when it first appears at the beginning of Section Six. The diary mostly consists of Death's complaining but we can really see Death's true feelings about his own job and his reactions to the catastrophic events that plagued the first half of the twentieth century. The thing Death wants most right now is a break. He simply wants to be able to relax and let someone else do his job of collecting the millions of souls from the people that die on a regular basis. But he can't. There is no one else with his abilitiy to be anywhere and everywhere at once and so he can't take a break. He can't do anything except work harder when massacres, wars, and famines take the lives of millions of people. He is amused by the humans' imagery of himself as a scythe wielding shade of terror when in reality he is just the delivery boy from Earth to another place. His reactions to these really establish him as human and make him closer to the reader.
Death doesn't take the same sort of tired and frustrated mindset in The Long Walk to Dachau. What he's doing is fulfilling his duty as a narrator, giving an unbiased view of what is happening at this point in the story. He (?*) gives an accurate portrait of what the Hews walking through Molching are. Pitiful, living, walking corpses, nearly dead with hunger and fatigue and the humiliation of simply being who they really are, Jews. They're being assaulted and ridiculed for absolutely no good reason and Death does a spectacular job of conveying all the feelings and atrocities that have been heaped on the European Jews.
Markus Zusak does an incredible job of transforming Death from something inevitable that many people fear into a person that many people can relate to on a variety of different levels, if it's complaining about a dead-end job or discussing major historic events. Zusak may be relating this transformation to Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s, transforming his image from a lowly Nazi party member to one of the most powerful men in the world. Zusak's transformation of death however is from a looming, almost scary prospect to just something that should happen naturally and automatically.
*Is Death male or female? A child or adult? What proof is there of your opinion?
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