Colour and Metaphor
“It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it had pulled it on, the way you pull on a jumper.”
Use of Listing
- “There were two guards.
- There was a mother and her daughter.
- One corpse.
- The mother, the girl and the corpse remained stubborn and silent.
Introducing minor characters first. A “periodic structure” building tension
“The guards were tall and short. The tall one always spoke first, though he was not in charge. He looked at the smaller, rounder one. The one with the juicy red face.”
German – clues to setting
“Spinnst du?”
Implausible imagery
“His skin widened.”
Personifying the colour and the snow. There’s a naiivity to this.
“who”
Dischordant level of specificity. More information given about where he stands than the soul in his arms, which he treats with neutrality.
“I stood a little to the right.”
Pop culture reference
“dynamic train guard duo”
Can he truly be perceived?
“ I clearly remember that my breath was loud that day. I’m surprised the guards didn’t notice me as they walked by.”
Cliff-hanger
“Tears were frozen to the book thief’s face.”
Further development of colour imagery
“Next is a signature black, to show the poles of my versatility, if you like. It was the darkest moment before the dawn.”
Further personification – Death seems not to recognise the special status of humans
“This time I had come for a man of perhaps twenty-four years of age. It was a beautiful thing in some ways. The plane was still coughing. Smoke was leaking from both its lungs.”
Gentle incongruity
“From the toolkit, the boy took out, of all things, a teddy bear.”
The way “Death” works. Like a mechanic.
“I walked in, loosened his soul and carried it gently out.”
Continuing colour imagery – Bone
“was the colour of bone.”
Further suggestion that Death has a ‘human’ form – that he ‘walks among us’
“As I made my way through”
Extensive personification
“He remained shrouded amongst his uniform as the greying light arm-wrestled the sky.
Red Colour
“The last time I saw her was red.”
Every chapter starts with the setting personified
“The streets were ruptured veins. Blood streamed till it was dried on the road, and the bodies were stuck there, like driftwood after the flood.”
Human souls as a commodity
“A packet of souls.”
From metaphysical to the mundane
- “Was it fate?
- Misfortune?
- Is that what glued them down like that?
- Of course not.
- Let’s not be stupid.
- It probably had more to do with the hurled bombs, thrown down by humans hiding in the clouds.”
Very interesting 3rd person omniscience from Death – especially when contrasted against the nativity he seems to exhibit elsewhere
“Apart from everything else, the book thief wanted desperately to go back to the basement, to write, or to read through her story one last time. In hindsight, I see it so obviously on her face. She was dying for it – the safety, the home of it – but she could not move. Also, the basement no longer existed. It was part of the mangled landscape.”
Death is not all-powerful
“But that is not allowed.”
Is this a reference to the past or the future. Is Death telling this of the past? What time is he in now?
“Her book was stepped on several times as the clean-up began, and although orders were given to clear only the mess of concrete, the girl’s most precious item was thrown aboard a garbage truck, at which point I was compelled. I climbed aboard and took it in my hand, not realising that I would read her story several hundred times over the years, on my travels. I would watch the places where we intersected, and marvel at what the girl saw and how she survived. That is the best I can do – watch it fall into line with everything else I spectated during that time.”
He saw her three times, and there were three colours – Red, White, Black – (Nazi Flag)
“When I recollect her, I see a long list of colours, but it’s the three in which I saw her in the flesh that resonate the most. Sometimes, I manage to float far above those three moments. I”
Here it is. One of a handful.
The reason for writing this book.
The Book Thief.
“It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt – an immense leap of an attempt – to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.
If you feel like it, come with me. I will tell you a story.
I’ll show you something.”
Told from the omniscient future. Use of “we” suggesting we as readers are also looking back. As we are – on history.
“We now know, of course, that the boy didn’t make it.”
Limits to death’s power
“but I really have no control over that.”
Discordant analogy
“boy’s spirit was soft and cold, like ice-cream.”
Does Death have access to the insides of us? This is true omniscience
“Her heart at that point was slippery and hot, and loud, so loud so loud.”
A reference to the ‘operating under orders’ excuse for many Nazi war criminals, perhaps?
“The other did what he was told. The question is, what if the other is a lot more than one?”
Death is invisible
“I waved.
No-one waved back.”
Death’s compassionate perception of humanity
“Liesel was sure her mother carried the memory of him, slung over her shoulder. She dropped him. She saw his feet and legs and body slap the platform.
How could she walk?
How could she move?
That’s the sort of thing I’ll never know, or comprehend – what humans are capable of.”
More colour imagery
- “A T R A N S L A T I O N
- Himmel = Heaven”
- “The day was grey, the colour of Europe.”
Constant references to the language of the Nazi Holocaust
“A man was also in the car. He remained with the girl while Frau Heinrich disappeared inside. He never spoke. Liesel assumed he was there to make sure she didn’t run away, or to force her inside if she gave them any trouble. Later, however, when the trouble did start, he simply sat there and watched. Perhaps he was only the last resort, the final solution”
Continued foreshadowing
“When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when the books and the words started not just to mean something, but everything. Was it when she first set eyes on the room with shelves and shelves of them? ”
First specific reference to her jewishness
“Her hair was a close enough brand of German-blonde, but she had dangerous eyes. Dark brown.”
Hans Hubermann is presented as likely to survive the war right from the start. But what about Rosa?
“He had already cheated me in one world war, but would later be put into another (as a perverse kind of reward) where he would somehow manage to avoid me again.”
Observation about the use of children’s point of view in literature.
“The human child – so much cannier at times than the stupefyingly ponderous adult.”
Liesel sees the value in Hans Hubermann
“When he turned the light on in the small callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.”
Rosa also loved Liesel
“But she did love Liesel Meminger.”
Death’s First Person Omniscience. So interesting.
“I know it sounds strange, but that’s how it felt to her.”
Death moves through time.
“Soon they would both be in the war. One would be making bullets. The other would be shooting them.”
Death’s conscious understatement
“The first thing they did there was make sure your Heil Hitler was working properly”
Dark humour and personification
“Frau Diller was a sharp-edged woman with fat glasses and a nefarious glare. She developed this evil look to discourage the very idea of stealing from her shop, which she occupied with soldier-like posture, a refrigerated voice and even breath that smelt like Heil Hitler. The shop itself was white and cold, and completely bloodless. The small house compressed beside it shivered with a little more severity than the other buildings on Himmel Street”
Frau Diller
“She lived for her shop and her shop lived for the Third Reich.”
Liberal use of personification
“Their uniforms walked upright and their black boots further polluted the snow.”
Personification perhaps used to distance from the acts of war. References to anti-semitism as if it were an unchanged level fact
“the imposing town hall, which in later years would be chopped off at the knees and buried. A few of the shops were abandoned and still labelled with yellow stars and anti-Jewish slurs”
Metaphor
“Those houses were almost like lepers. At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured German terrain.”
Foreshadowing
“He was there for her at the beginning, and he would be there later on, when Liesel’s frustration boiled over. But he wouldn’t do it for free.”
Vivid original metaphor, somehow naiive
“At the request of the starter, he raised to crouching position – and the gun clipped a hole in the night”
How a decent person can not act
“T H E C O N T R A D I C T O R Y P O L I T I C S O F
A L E X S T E I N E R
Point One: He was a member of the Nazi Party but he did not hate the Jews, or anyone else for that matter.”
Rudy’s naivety
“I didn’t know that. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a licence?”
“I know, son – but you’ve got beautiful blond hair and big, safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that, is that clear?”
Further foreshadowing – reminder that death is timeless
“Four years later, when she came to write in the basement, two thoughts struck Liesel about the trauma of wetting the bed.”
Swift shift in point of view
“This might be harder than I thought. She caught him thinking it, just for a moment.”
Synaesthesia
“T H E S M E L L O F F R I E N D S H I P”
Zusak takes pleasure in juxtaposition of the mundane and the sacred
“Soon, they were on Himmel Street, carrying the words, the music, the washing.”
Post-modern self-reference. Foreshadowing
“She saw it but didn’t realise until later, when everything came together. She didn’t see him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann’s accordion was a story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It would carry a suitcase, a book, and two questions. A story. Story after story. Story within story.”
Death re-enters the narrative
“. A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way – I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.)”
The metaphors for words begin
“Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out, like the rain.”
Observations about the simple components of horrors
“In a way it was destiny. You see, people may tell you that Nazi Germany was built on anti-Semitism, a somewhat overzealous leader and a nation of hate-fed bigots, but it would have all come to nothing had the Germans not loved one particular activity – to burn.”
Associating observation of colour with sensitivity to feeling
“Look at the colours,’ Papa said. It’s hard not to like a man who not only notices the colours, but speaks them.”
Hans
“The silver in his eyes, however, wasn’t warm, like Papa’s – they’d been Führered.”
Personifying the Third Reich
“That was when a great shiver arrived.
It waltzed through the window with the draught. Perhaps it was the breeze of the Third Reich, gathering even greater strength.”
Death’s opinion on Human nature
“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”
Personification of the crowd
“The crowd was itself. There was no swaying it, squeezing through or reasoning with it. You breathed with it and you sang its songs. You waited for its fire.”
Metonymy
“You didn’t see people. Only uniforms and signs.”
“By the time she made it back to Papa and Wolfgang Edel, the book was starting to burn her. It seemed to be igniting.”
Is this Death? Can Liesel see Death?
“The shadow’s identity, and”
“He will never be approved,’ it said, ‘even if he buys a hundred copies of Mein Kampf.”
Monster
“The cold was climbing out of the ground.”
Direct address to reader as “my friend”
“We’ve both had it too easy till now, my friend, don’t you think? How about we forget Molching for a minute or two?”
“So there you have it.
You’re well aware of exactly what was coming to Himmel Street by the end of 1940.
I know.
You know.”
Liesel noticing personification
“the snow was shivering outside. The girl loved that – the shivering snow.”
Another function of books
“Mein Kampf.
Of all the things to save him.”
Death’s developing view of humanity. We have it all within us.
“Rudy Steiner couldn’t resist smiling. In years to come, he would be a giver of bread, not a stealer – proof again of the contradictory human being. So much good, so much evil. Just add water.”
Interesting in the light of the fact that Molching doesn’t exist.
“He followed the map in his mind, from Pasing to Molching”
Irony
“Hans, I think he was doing his best to avoid me.”
Hans
“He was either too lucky, or he deserved to live, or there was a good reason for him to live.”
Death and Max
“He had not looked something like me in the face. Not yet.”
Death likes Max for his Stupid Gallantry
“When death captures me,’ the boy vowed, ‘he will feel my fist on his face.’
Personally, I quite like that. Such stupid gallantry.
Yes.
I like that a lot.”
Death’s deadpan – his laconic humour
“You don’t always get what you wish for.
Especially in Nazi Germany.”
Building paranoia – tinged with Death
“When he stopped pacing, his shadow loomed behind him, watching. Someone was always watching.”
