The mother, the girl and the corpse remained stubborn and silent

Personifying the colour and the snow. There’s a naiivity to this.

“who”

“Her hair was a close enough brand of German-blonde, but she had dangerous eyes. Dark brown.”

Component 1: NAME THE TEXT, THE AUTHOR, THE THEME, AND THE TECHNIQUES USED TO CONVEY THE THEME. RESTATE THE QUESTION

In his novel, “The Book Thief”, Markus Zusak communicates his ideas about the vulnerability of all societies to colluding in atrocities by re-framing the events of the Nazi Holocaust in the mid-20th century. Like many texts in the genre of Magical Realism, a variety of techniques are used by Zusak to help the reader to look at something familiar with new eyes. These techniques include language features such as personification, metaphor and the manipulation of listing. These features are all used to deepen our understanding of The Book Thief’s above purpose. Furthermore, the features deepen our understanding of the theme of how we can be unfairly betrayed by our personal attributes and consequently suppress our true selves for the sake of society and in the case of The Book Thief, for survival.

Zusak integrates personification into The Book Thief through the use of magical realism. He does this in order to deepen our understanding of how we can be betrayed by who we really are and how society can cause us to suppress ourselves. “Who”

Metaphor, a common element of magical realism, is used throughout The Book Thief to shine a new light on the holocaust. This forces us to rethink about these times and helps us to understand a key theme of the novel: The betrayal our appearance can cause and the consequent suppression of who we truly are. “Her hair was a close enough brand of German-blonde, but she had dangerous eyes. Dark brown.” This metaphor exposes to us the importance of human characteristics. Liesel’s eyes are described as dangerous. Eyes themselves cannot be dangerous and this is not what Zusak is alluding to. The dangerous thing about these eyes is, in line with a metaphor, not the literal object being discussed. The eyes are dangerous due to their perception by the extreme society of Nazi Germany, where the blue eyes of the Aryan race are superior to others. On the other hand, Liesel’s hair is described as a “close enough brand of German-blonde”. This shows us that Liesel has a hair colour that is percieved by her society as close enough to acceptable. It is not literally a German brand but because Germany and it’s idealistic Aryan race work to widespread this blonde hair blue eye appearance, Zusak enhances the idea through the ‘brand.’ metaphor. This side by side betrayal and acceptance of Liesel’s characteristics and the lack of control she has over it is the theme that Zusak’s description brings about

Another language feature Zusak uses to deepen our understanding of the theme in The Book Thief is listing. Listing is manipulated throughout the novel in a style typical to magical realism, by hiding one unique ‘lie’ in a list where it doesn’t belong.

In conclusion, Zusak uses the language features of metaphor, personification and listing to deepen readers understanding of a key theme of “The Book Thief”.