The Book Thief: Imagery 3 key examples

The image of ash falling like snowflakes foreshadows the bittersweetness of the story to come. Death draws on the cognitive dissonance that occurs when a person expects one sensory experience and gets the opposite. The shocking pain the reader can imagine were they to catch hot ash in their mouth feels even more shocking and painful by contrast with the cold, pleasant sensation of a snowflake on the tongue. The ash contains remains of not only buildings, but also bodies. As opposed to the sweet, crisp taste of snow, the taste of the ash is surely bitter, and even nauseating. The Book Thief is a story about a girl's childhood, and it has plenty of sweet moments. For example, Liesel and Rudy's friendship-turned-romance (almost) is full of playful joy, and it almost seems as though the two of them will make it out alive together. The ash disguised as snow is a hint that happy endings are not to be trusted in this book. After all, it is set during World War II, and it is narrated by Death.

The fact that the ash looks like beautiful white snow further hints at the way some characters are drawn in by the Nazi party's false promises about a utopian future for White Germans. For example, Hans Hubermann, Junior, encourages his father to join the party. Frau Diller is so loyal to the party that she keeps a framed photo of Hitler in her shop and forces customers to salute him. The way the "snow" turns to burning ash on the tongue foreshadows how characters buying into the party's promises usually find out that they have been sold a lie. Often, they find out the hard way. Frau Diller's loyalty, for instance, does nothing to protect her from the bombs.

The "devastating, home-cooked red" of the sky builds on Death's earlier claim that the sky is the color of burned soup. The soup foreshadows the meal Rosa Hubermann will try to feed her family, day in and day out, throughout the war. Rosa's soup usually tastes terrible, sometimes gets burned, and never quite satisfies anyone's hunger. Nevertheless, it represents Rosa's commitment to taking what little she has and turning it into something that will help her family make it through another week. By comparing the sky to Rosa's soup, Death not only emphasizes the intensity of the red but also makes the disconcerting suggestion that the bombing of Himmel Street is "home-cooked" by people who thought they were doing what was needed to get their families through the war, one day at a time.

Liesel's language is imaginative. While it is odd to hear a cloud compared to a rope and the sun compared to a hole, Max finds that the strange specificity of her words help him envision the outside where he has not set foot in a year. The imagery inspires him to paint a scene on the wall of the basement. He even builds on Liesel's similes, turning the cloud into a tightrope the two of them balance on together as they walk toward the sun.

Death often uses imagery to describe what the sky looks like as he carries souls away. Liesel's playful description of the sky is similarly poetic, demonstrating that she, like Death, is an apt storyteller. However, instead of a mournful monument to someone's death, Liesel's poetic description is a gift for Max. It provides him with the hope that even though he is stuck in the dark, he and Liesel might be walking together toward some brighter future.

The cookies are stale, but they are nonetheless incredibly enticing to a child who lives on a regular diet of watered-down soup. Before even touching the plate, Liesel can imagine trying to pry the bottom layer of sticky cookies off the plate. She can imagine how the rest of them will have fused together into a "chewy mound." Ilsa Hermann would probably never serve cookies in this state to visitors entering through her door. However, to Liesel, they are a dream come true. Even after they have been sitting for two weeks, the smell hits her at full force when she hoists herself through the window. She even tastes "sugar and dough, and thousands of pages" in the room without ever biting into a cookie.

This last image more than anything suggests that Liesel's delight in the cookies has more to do with her imagination than her tangible reality. It takes a powerful smell to activate the sense of taste. The smell of sugar and dough has likely dissipated by now. The idea that Liesel can literally taste "thousands of pages" in the air is even more difficult to believe. However, the image helps convey the intensity of Liesel's desire for books. She hungers for them in the same way a starving child hungers for cookies. Ilsa Hermann's office smells like cookie dough and "thousands of pages" because it represents abundance beyond belief for a girl who lives a life of scarcity.