Book Thief Paragraph
Quote: “The Survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions, I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colours to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling amongst a jigsaw puzzle of realisation, despair and surprise.”
Markus Zusak uses personification of death to show the despair and revaluation of those that are touched by death but only through the third person. His novel The Book Thief is set in Germany during world war 2 and is narrated by death itself. During a part in the novel death tells the reader “The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, {…}. I deliberately seek out the colours to keep my mind off them, {…} I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling amongst a jigsaw puzzle of realisation, despair and surprise”. Zusak is showing that even death is affected by the people who remain after a death as he uses colours as a drug to keep his mind off the people he left. This tells the reader that while death is immense, we who are left behind are possibly more effected than those who are taken and Zusak shows this through a perspective that is far different to our own.
Ned, this is a good response, showing some insight into the use of personification and its implications within the context of the scene.
Now the next step is (and feel free to write further paragraphs on this) to explore why Zusak might have chosen to personify death (and perhaps use colours as euphemisms) – what over-all result might this achieve that is unique to that effect.
Then, after this, the job we have ahead is to determine why these elements of magical realism are used in texts. What can we infer about why these fantasies are introduced to otherwise realist scenarios. You might wish to research to see if your hypothesis is supported. Why did magical realism come into being as a literary genre, and why might this have been?
Let me know if you’d like to discuss this.
CW