Structures, features and conventions

The Book Thief

Death

Whose voice do we hear mostly as we read the novel?

Is the voice that of ‘a character-like entity’ created by the author as a ‘mask’ for Zusak to wear in print?

Or is Death a pseudo character, positioned somewhere between narrator and character?

As such, Death can be seen as an interesting literary device.

Is Death a reliable or unreliable narrator?

Style: Point of view

• Told in the first person point of view with Death as the narrator

• Death is not a character within the novel; his view is unique in that he does not influence any of the plot events directly• The narrator is relating the story to his readers as he

understands it through a story written by a little girl about her own life.

• He adds in definitions and small things that he has observed, but does not take an active part in the overall plot.

• Death is a character with thoughts and opinions of his own. • The point of view is clear, easy to follow, and entertaining in

a comical way that gives a touch of amusement to a sad and difficult topic.

Narrative

Narrative is the representation of an event or series of events. • In The Book Thief, the narrative is interrupted with visually distinct

micro narratives, lyrical observations and comments about events and characters.

• These interruptions might be described as ‘embedded narratives’ or a story within a story, framed by the larger narrative.

• One such example is the opening of Leisel’s own book, ‘The Book Thief’: ‘Page 1. I try to ignore it, but I know this all started with the train and the snow and my coughing brother. I stole my first book that day…’

• Alternatively, a few of these interruptions might fit the category metalepsis, ‘a violation of narrative levels’, e.g. an authorial intrusion in the flow of the narrative – but in this case, an intrusion by the narrator, Death.

Something to think about

Narrative discourse is infinitely malleable. It can expand and contract, leap backward and forward, but as we take in information from the discourse we sort it out in our minds, reconstructing an order of events that we call the story…

In the Case of The Book Thief

The story is always influenced– by a voice, a style of writing, camera angles, actors’ interpretations – so that what we call the story is really something that we construct.

In the case of The Book Thief, voice and writing style are parts of the construction we work with as we assemble Leisel’s story from Death’s narrative.

The structure

Zusak uses the following structural devices in crafting the narrative:

Prolepsis (flash forward): Ironically, Zusak uses this to create suspense.

He uses ‘spoilers’. In Part five, ‘The Floating Book’, Death interrupts the narrative with the announcement, ‘Rudy…didn’t deserve to die the way he did.’

Effect? This increases the sense of foreboding.

The structure continued

In the Prologue, ‘The Flag’ Death refers to ‘The last time I saw her’ as she knelt in the rubble of the bomb blast that destroys Molching, clutching, and then dropping her book, ‘The Book Thief’.

This is the one she authored, her ‘most precious item’. Death reports that he ‘climbed aboard’ the garbage truck to retrieve the book he would then read ‘several hundred times’, marvelling at Leisel’s survival.

The rest of the narrative describes the unfolding events that she had chronicled in her book.

So ‘The Flag’ is set in a narrative mid-point, while the Epilogue records events after the war and provides closure. Both sections reinforce Death’s stand that Leisel’s story haunts him: ‘I am haunted by humans’ (an oxymoron).

More on the structure

In Part ten, ‘The End of the World’, Death gives another flash forward, this time reflecting on why he does so: ‘Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it’s to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare myself for the telling.’

Structure again

Flash back: In a sense, the whole narrative is a flashback. In the Epilogue, Death interrupts with the news flash: ‘A Last Fact: I should tell you that the book thief died only yesterday.’

Structure

Conclusion: the narrative is not chronological. Effect? For human beings, death occupies a continuous

present. Therefore, Death is not bound by time frames. Deaths interrupt life (much like the motif’s in the novel), so the non-sequential narrative discourse reflects this fact of life.

Zusak also places stories within stories within stories e.g. the story Max wrote for Leisel on the pages of Mein Kampf, within the pages of the book she wrote, ‘The Book Thief’, the novel Death finds so arresting, and whence he gets some of his information about her life, within the pages of the text penned for us by Zusak.

Language

• The language of the novel is clear, precise English that borders on formal.

• Due to setting (Germany), many German words are also included. Many of these words are defined by the narrator, but some of them are not.

• The words that are not defined are used in such a way that the reader can usually figure out what they mean by the preceding and following text.

• The number of foreign phrases is not overwhelming and it does not make the novel any more difficult to read than it would be were these phrases not used.