Table of Contents
Markus Zusak was born on June 23, 1975 in Sydney Australia. He came from humble beginnings as the son of a house painter and a maid. He is the youngest of four children and neither of his parents could read or write any English when they first arrived to Australia. Because Zusak’s parents were illiterate, they strongly encouraged their children to learn how to read and write in English fluently. Zusak took an interest in writing at a very young age, and he started writing fiction when he was 16. As Zusak grew older and went through jobs as a janitor and a house painter, he finally settled on being an English teacher. He was most likely influenced to choose this job because of his parents’ wishes when he was a kid to be fluent in English.
Nazi Germany and Death The Book Thief takes place in Hitler’s Germany, between 1939 and 1943. These were dark times, WWII is just starting to heat up, and Hitler’s ultimate goal was to create a superior race of Aryan Germans. To achieve this absurd goal, he would round up everybody who didn’t fit the Aryan description, and he either killed them on the spot, or worked them to death, all the while ridding them of the necessities to live. Barely any food, water, or shelter. And God help anybody who wanted to help these poor souls.
If someone tried to help them in any way shape or form, they would be punished too. These are the events that led to the holocaust, and the deaths of tens of millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, handicapped people, and sometimes even political opponents and rebels. There is a great abundance of death during this time, so who could provide a better perspective than death itself. Death guides us through the tragedies of these times and provides a unique style, tone, and perspective when compared to a human narrator. He is sympathetic yet puzzled at the actions of humans, but he can’t help finding beauty in them, sometimes.
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The diamond in the rough of Nazi Germany is Liesel Meminger, a 10-year-old girl who lives on the bleak, gray Himmel Street with her mama and papa. However, these are her foster parents. She doesn’t know much of her father and she believes that he is actually dead, and she had a brother, but he died after a coughing fit on a train, the memory of her dead brother haunts her for the rest of her life. At his funeral, she commits her first act of book thievery, the first of many, when she steals, The Grave Digger’s Handbook.
A Personable Death
“Here is a small fact, you are going to die.” Death states so frankly within the first pages of the book. And he’s right, whether you like it or not, you will die at some point, and death will be there to guide you when you do. What makes death such a deep and interesting character though is that he’s not the bad guy, in fact he’s far from it. He has a lot of human-like qualities, like when he says that he prefers a “chocolate brown sky” (Zusak 4), when he collects souls, when he gets depressed or joyous watching the humans, or when he talks of never getting any vacation time because he’s always on the clock. This brings about a very interesting dichotomy between the humans and death. Ironically, death sometimes can seem more compassionate and human-like than the humans because of how inhumane and dark the conditions of the times were, with Hitler and his Nazi’s. Throughout the book, death has a constant internal struggle between his passion for studying humans, and his duty of guiding souls to their deaths.
Evidence of this struggle can be seen in the very first words of the book, “First the colors. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things. Or at least how I try” (Zusak 3). Death notices the colors first because that’s what helps him distract himself from his job. Death enjoys looking at the colors and he enjoys describing them vividly. He also likes the colors not only because they’re pretty to look at, but also because they won’t ever hurt anybody or anything. That’s why he sees the humans second. He enjoys studying humans, but he doesn’t like how evil they can be.
However, sometimes he prioritizes his interest in humans over the colors and his job. Such as when he spends his time watching Liesel and her family. There is a war going on out there and he’s got tons of souls to gather because of it, but he chooses to stay and watch Liesel instead. This kind of cancels out what he said about the colors and humans because he says he likes to see the colors then the humans, but in this case, he chose to watch Liesel instead of going to fulfill his duty of collecting souls, and observing the colorful skies above.
You would think that death is a dark, soulless omniscient being, with no moral compass, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. An excellent example of deaths compassion is when Rudy and Liesel find a pilot that crashed landed into the forest near them after bombing Himmel street. First of all, the way that death acknowledges things that are inanimate is very telling of deaths benevolence. “The plane was still coughing. Smoke was leaking from both its lungs.” (Zusak 9). Notice his choice of words here, still coughing, smoke leaking from its lungs. Not only does this paint a very clear picture, but it shows that death has respect for everything on Earth, even things that aren’t alive. That shows how big of a heart death has, a circular heart that is. “A human doesn’t have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time” (Zusak 491).
Death definitely has work to do, with the war still going on, he has lots of dead things to deal with. But again, he finds himself watching things that are very much alive, and personifying things that were never alive to begin with, like when he describes the destroyed plane after it plummeted into the earth, “It’s wings were now sawn-off arms. No more flapping. Not for this metallic little bird.” (Zusak 9). Death then, once again gets distracted by his passion for studying humans. As the pilot barely clings to life and lies there in what used to be a perfectly good airplane, Rudy reaches into his little toolbox that he brought with him, and takes out a teddy bear, and places it on the pilot’s chest. Death is beyond intrigued at the actions of Rudy. How could a little boy show that much empathy to a man who just destroyed his home.
Rudy looked at the man before him, and didn’t see an enemy pilot, he saw a fellow human, and did his best to comfort him. “I’m always finding humans at their best and their worst.” Death says, “I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have a good sense to die” (Zusak 491). This entire scene speaks volumes, and death described the scene in such a fantastic way. Right there in front of him is the best and worst of humans, the ugliest we can be, and the most beautiful. A pilot fulfilling his duty of destroying innocent people and their lives, and an innocent child, a victim of circumstance, is there to comfort him in his final minutes of his life. Both the pilot and Rudy, even though they are on opposite sides of a war, they have a good sense to die.
After death takes the pilots soul away, we see him again struggle with his duty of guiding souls to their deaths. Whenever death carries a soul in his arms, the color in the sky starts to gray, and an eclipse takes away all of the color in the sky. This is another reason why death doesn’t like his job. “You see, to me, for just a moment, despite all of the colors that touch and grapple with what I see in this world, I will often catch an eclipse when a human dies. I’ve seen millions of them. I’ve seen more eclipses than I care to remember” (Zusak 11). Again, deaths tone and choice of words here implies that this is another aspect of his duty that he doesn’t enjoy. “I’ve seen more eclipses than I care to remember.” This is a harrowing task for death, he enjoys looking at the gorgeous sky, but when the sky eclipses for a split second, it reminds him that he is stuck being death, and he gets depressed thinking about all of the eclipses that he’ll have to endure for the rest of eternity.
Death running from responsibility to enjoy what he is passionate about is another way of showing how human death is. We can all relate to how he feels. We all want to do what we love to do, but we can’t. We all have responsibilities as people and in order to enjoy our free time, we have to get our work done. But that’s hard, and we often find ourselves running from our jobs to chase what makes us happy. Doing what is necessary can be a daunting, redundant task, but we have to do what we have to do. What’s so funny about most of the story, is that pretty much all of it is death sneaking away from his job to go do what he enjoys, studying humans.
He barely ever talks about his job because he doesn’t like it at all. Death finds comfort in watching people, it helps him make his job less mundane. Then again, don’t we all do that? Don’t we all try and find the little things that help us escape from our harsh realities? Whether it’s in the form of dry humor, or an introspective perspective, death is just like us, living day to day, working his 9 to 5, keeping himself busy with the little things that he enjoys, and escaping those dark, and loathsome eclipses.
Zusak’s interpretation of death is fabulous, he somehow made death deep, funny, introspective, and remarkably relatable. The Book Thief would be nowhere near as good if death wasn’t our humble narrator. Death’s presence on every page of the book is palpable, and even though he seems to have no control of the outcome of the story, his constant presence is still unnerving at the very least.
He’s not a human, he’s simply just an impartial bystander watching, and commentating on all of the ugliness and beauty that goes on around him. And because he isn’t human, he can be less emotional about what is happening around him, and he can give a clear, honest, and compassionate perspective on the situation. That is something a human narrator would not be able to do. And speaking of unnerving, you would think that the entire book would be a dark, emotional roller-coaster that shows all of humanity’s greatness, and its plummet from it. While it still is very much is, death can sometimes be surprisingly humorous and sarcastic, even while observing something as dark as the holocaust.
You would think that this story would probably be one of the worst, if not the worst places to inject comedy into, but it somehow works. Death’s dry, dark humor allows us to almost, “come up for air,” if you will. It grounds us back down to earth, and it provides a little bit of comfort in the darkness of humanity’s biggest mistakes. Death in this book is one of the best characters I’ve ever had the pleasure to read about, and Zusak deserves every award he was given for making death so compassionate, relatable, and real. In this story, death helps us take a hard look at ourselves, and our past.
Works Cited
- Shmoop Editorial Team. ‘Death in The Book Thief.’ Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc., https://www.shmoop.com/book-thief/death.html, 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 1 Jul, 2019.
- LitCharts Editorial Team. “Death Character Analysis. LitCharts.com https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-book-thief/characters/death 1 July, 2019
- Justin T. Cass. Chazelle, Damien ed. ‘The Book Thief Characters’. GradeSaver, https://www.gradesaver.com/the-book-thief/study-guide/character-list, 30 November 2009 Web. 1 July 2019.
- SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Book Thief.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2013. Web. https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/the-book-thief/section2/, 1 Jul. 2019.
