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1
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"
the last line written by Liesel Meminger in her novel "The Book Thief," p
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Ilsa Hermann gives her a blank book and encourages her to write; Liesel writes the
story of her life, containing both tragedy and beauty, at a fevered pace
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2
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Find yourself a mirror
while I continue
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307

Far from being a Grim Reaper-like representation, The Book Thief's Death is a weary and
cynical character with the relatively menial duty of carrying away the souls of the recently
deceased
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Death thus takes a skeptical view of war and
humanity itself, believing humanity to be capable of tremendous and irrational evils
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"Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without
question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye
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350

Carrying souls from the gas chamber in Auschwitz, Death imagines the composition of the
sky beyond the rain clouds that cover the death camp
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The "giant blue eye" is potentially a watchful and just God, whose
sight has been obscured while His Chosen People are being massacred by the Nazis
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"They had no qualms about stealing, but they needed to be told
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Death's narration, p
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Unlike Arthur, Viktor is a cruel boy who steals for fun and demands
obedience from the others
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5
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Her eyes had blackened
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All from
words
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"
Death's narration, p
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She imagines Ilsa's face becoming physically battered by Liesel's cruel invective
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6
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It chores me
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It's the
machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me
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243

As narrator, Death employs the technique of foreshadowing throughout the novel to reveal,
among other things, the fates -- i
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, survival or death -- of individual characters
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Marcus Zusak's
employment of foreshadowing places emphasis on the events and "machinations" in Nazi
Germany that lead the characters to their ends
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"There were the erased pages of Mein Kampf, gagging, suffocating under the paint as
they turned
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237

Max whitewashes pages of Hitler's propaganda book Mein Kampf and draws an entirely new
story upon them: a brief retelling of his life, his family's persecution by the Nazis, and his
friendship with Liesel
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8
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375

Death compares the plight of the German civilians cowering in a bomb shelter with the certain
death of the Jews trapped in Nazi gas chambers
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While they are all citizens of a nation in the process of killing
millions of innocent people, some, like Rosa and Hans, quietly defy the Nazis by hiding a
Jew, while others are defenseless children who cannot possibly be held responsible for crimes
planned before they were even born
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"The word shaker and the young man climbed up to the horizontal trunk
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When they looked back, they noticed that
the majority of onlookers had started to return to their own places
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Out
there
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But as they walked on, they stopped several times, to listen
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"
excerpt from Max's story "The Word Shaker," p
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She
stays at the top of the tree until her friend ("the young man") meets her there
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They walk down the tree
trunk, and although most of the indoctrinated people return to Hitler's forest, others quietly
follow the two friends
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Max's story aims
to encourage Liesel to be brave and willing to counter words of hatred with words of love;
these final lines suggest that others would be willing to follow her if she took such a stand
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"I am haunted by humans
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550
The Book Thief is framed by Death's contemplation of the worth of humanity, and Death's
inability to reconcile the remarkable cruelty and the remarkable compassion of which human
beings are simultaneously capable
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Thus, Death tells Liesel that it is "haunted" by humans, just as humans are haunted by
Death
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