![]() ![]() The book shows us that mortality is very present in the lives of each character as Death introduces the book to the reader. We can not analyze the themes in The Book Thief without talking of mortality as Death is the book’s narrator. Immediately though, one of the Nazi soldiers mercilessly whips Hans and the Jewish man, a great act of cruelty heightened by the fact that it comes in response to Hans’s kindness. Hans reaches out to him and gives him a piece of bread, a small act of great kindness. There, Hans Hubermann tries to help a weak Jew suffering hunger and deprivation, being marched through town on the way to Dachau. There was a scene that showed both kindness and cruelty at once. Again, the concentration camps linger unseen in the book’s background as the most extreme example of cruelty. On the contrary, we also see acts of cruelty, like the treatment of Rudy by Viktor Chemmel and Franz Deutscher. Because of the political context of the time, with hatred and violence against Jews being rampant, Max finds Liesel’s kindness to be extraordinary. Liesel is specially kind to Max, and the two share a strong bond. One of the small acts of kindness we see in the novel includes hiding and caring for Max by the Hubermanns even at great risk to themselves, Rudy giving the teddy bear to the dying pilot, Ilsa Hermann inviting Liesel into her library. We see the various degrees of human cruelty and kindness in the novel, from the slight to the most extreme examples. Again, the power of words is seen in the book she left behind, giving her a connection to Death as we saw at the end of the story. The story shows how Liesel has used words to create a refuge for herself amid Nazism and later uses words to calm her neighbors during the air raids by reading from her book. He said that Adolf Hitler uses just words and not guns or money or some other instrument to take over the world. In the story he wrote, he suggests that words are the most powerful force there is. In the book, the greatest gift Max gives Liesel is words in the form of the ‘The Word Shaker,’ the story he writes for her. Liesel’s descriptions of the weather to Max later in the novel also help establish a bond between them. Through learning the alphabet and how to use it to make words, Liesel and Hans Hubermann began developing their deep bond. So many examples show how the words connect people up throughout the story. In The Book Thief, we see that words and, in extension, stories are among the most powerful ways people connect. The majority are themes of the power of words, kindness, and cruelty of humans, reading and writing, the duality of the Nazi era, mortality, and love. When analyzing The Book Thief, there are several themes one needs to look at. ![]()
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