Friday, March 14, 2014

Why Death?

“At that moment, you will be lying there (I rarely find people standing up). You will be caked in your own body. There might be a discovery; a scream will dribble down the air. The only sound I’ll hear after that will be my own breathing, and the sound of the smell, of my footsteps.”
- Death
If The Book Thief is a story about a young girl in Nazi Germany who steals books, learns to read, and eventually houses and befriends a Jew with her adoptive family, why is it narrated by Death? How does Death’s narration make the story better? What does Death provide that a first person narration or an unknown omnipresent narrator could not? In short, why Death?

To get feedback and assistance with these questions, I plan to ask my coworkers. I work at a library, so I think I will definitely gain a more helpful literary perspective from them.

4 comments:

  1. That is a very good question, and it has a lot of potential to be analyzed. Do the characters in the book ever talk about Death? Is it a recurring theme, or does it never come up? I'm excited to see what you come up with!

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    1. Thanks for the other questions. They really made me think.
      They never talk about Death specifically as a character, but the topic definitely comes up (it is Nazi Germany after all).

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  2. I think that's a good direction to go in. When I read The Book Thief, I thought that the most intriguing thing about it was the fact that it was narrated by Death. I think that maybe it's set in World War II and because Death can provide a different perspective on war than we usually see.

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  3. You know, I guess I don't always think about why the narrator is the narrator, but have always just accepted that they are there. Interesting thought process here...

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