The Book Thief: Metaphors 5 key examples

The pair of grave diggers is an allusion to one of the pivotal scenes in Shakspeare's Hamlet. In Act V of the play, Prince Hamlet sees two grave diggers making room for his newly-deceased girlfriend in an old burial ground. These grave diggers, who have become icons in literary history, represent the mortality shared by humans across all social classes. They are anonymous commoners tasked with digging up old skulls and bones to make room for a fresh corpse. That corpse happens to be that of a rich woman who is a casualty of high political intrigue. In the end, grandeur and status can't protect Ophelia from being manhandled by these commoners and tossed in with the other rotting bodies. She is mortal like the rest of them.

The shivering pair of grave diggers in Zusak's book immediately evoke Shakespeare's grave diggers and the idea of death as the thing that equalizes humans in the end. Zusak's Death has already described how he must carry everyone's soul away when it is time for them to die, no matter who they are. Still, Death puts pressure on the idea of the grave diggers as a symbol for equality in death. The person being buried in this scene is not a rich woman. Instead, the body belongs to a poor little boy who has lived a life shorter and less comfortable even than the grave diggers have enjoyed. Werner's death is a byproduct of poverty and persecution reinforced by corrupt politicians; had he had stable access to food, shelter, and medical treatment, he might have lived the same long life as Liesel. Death struggles to see how Werner's death equalizes anything.

As Death contemplates the injustice of Werner's death, the apprentice grave digger becomes a metaphor for all the "other" people who followed rather than issued orders in Nazi Germany. No one "called the shots" to kill Werner, but many people contributed to his death by complying with the idea that his family did not deserve social support. How responsible was each person who failed to help? The apprentice grave digger is ostensibly even less responsible for Werner's death than the people who passed him over while he was alive. Nonetheless, Death cannot help but notice that the apprentice has committed himself to an industry that has a symbiotic relationship with mass death. He can look forward to work as long as people keep dying; in turn, if he and other apprentices learn their jobs well, they will make it easy for society to dispose of bodies en masse. What truly seems to equalize people, this passage suggests, is the way social responsibility cascades. Every person plays some role in every other person's fate.

When a driver is about to hit a deer with their car, the deer will often stare directly into the oncoming headlights. Instead of getting out of the way while there is time, the deer stands frozen to the spot as though waiting to be hit and even pleading with the driver to help. The expression "deer in lights" or "deer in the headlights" is thus an idiom referring to shock and fear that freezes a person in place, helpless.

In this passage, Death brings up the idiom only to argue that it is not quite right to describe Ludwig's expression. Ludwig is shocked, afraid, and badly injured. He needs someone to help him. And yet, Death claims, Ludwig's expression is "nothing so typical or specific" as a deer in lights. A deer in lights is typical in that people hit deer with their cars all the time. And yet it is the result of a very specific kind of cross-species encounter: a deer crosses the road at an inopportune time, and a human fails to anticipate the deer's presence in time to avoid it. The deer's shock is partly owing to the fact that the deer and the car come from different worlds and do not expect to run into one another.

Ludwig may appear shocked, fearful, and helpless. However, Death claims, this is no unfortunate and unexpected encounter between beings from different worlds. "He was just an animal," Death writes, "hurt among the melee of its own kind, soon to be trampled by it." Ludwig, in his required Hitler Youth uniform, is part of the mob until it turns on him. In fact, he helped to whip up the frenzy that turned into the stampede that injured him. This injury is no unfortunate accident, as a deer collision is. Instead, it is the predictable outcome of mob behavior. Its predictability makes it all the more horrifying. Humans are supposed to use their reason and compassion to curb instincts that might make them hurt one another. These humans have abandoned all reason and compassion, to the point that they don't even notice Ludwig's injury. They have turned into "just animals" who visit casual violence on one another without any thought.

Max is alone in the Hubermanns' basement. He has never come face to face with Hitler, and he certainly has not been punched by millions of fists. However, by exaggerating the physical violence Max endures, Death captures the ongoing agony of his situation. He endures day after day in the cold, dark, lonely basement because "one by one," his "millions" of countrymen have all turned into his would-be murderers, or at the very least heartless bystanders who would rather "let him suffer" than intervene on his behalf. Anti-Semitism is a boxing ring that he cannot escape, where countless opponents line up to hit him while he is down. Their millions of fists have backed him into a corner where there is nowhere else to retreat to. If he is found in this basement, the entire game is up. The basement is not a safe haven, but merely a corner to retreat to in a ring where the fight never stops.

Max might be reasonably expected to lie down in defeat. Many people in his position would feel so hopeless, exhausted, and beaten down that they would never get up again. This is the outcome Hitler hopes for when he brings not only his own strength but also the strength of "an entire nation" down on Max. Max, however, learned how to fist fight in his youth, with Walter Kugler. He knows that the way to win is to keep getting up no matter what. The exaggerated boxing metaphor allows Death to show that Max's survival in the basement takes active, Herculean effort. He gets up, again and again, every time he wakes from his nightmare and realizes that he still has all the odds in the world stacked against him.

The "great forests of words" are a metaphor for Nazi propaganda, and the "nation of farmed thoughts" is a metaphor for a citizenry that has had their thoughts carefully cultivated and pruned by Hitler. By the 1940s, Hitler was of course using violence as a tool to maintain his power. However, he did not have to carry out the violence himself because he had convinced so many people to murder and torture their neighbors on his behalf. The idea that Hitler has planted words in people's minds and farmed their thoughts suggests that words are dangerous tools of manipulation. They can take root on the inside of someone's psychology, and before that person knows it their beliefs are being controlled from the outside.

At the same time, the metaphor makes clear that words themselves are not inherently dangerous and manipulative. Someone like Hitler can use words to cultivate "thought farms" that serve only to reinforce his power. However, words grow in "great forests," and their seeds can be harvested by anyone who preserves some ability to think for themself. The Word Shaker describes Liesel as someone who learns to do just that. Her dissenting ideas are eventually cut down, but their existence leaves a trace that can never be erased. Max's book thus suggests that Liesel should never give up the power to use her words for herself and for others, to help people see alternative ways of thinking.

The Battle of Stalingrad lasted for six and a half months before Hitler's forces finally surrendered on February 2, 1943. It was a turning point in World War II because it severely exhausted German resources and marked the first of Hitler's surrenders. Its casualty count surpassed that of any other World War II battle and possibly any other battle in history.

Robert Holtzapfel dies on January 5, less than a month before the end of the battle. At this point, the "dead Russians and Germans everywhere" make it clear to all present that they are part of a mass casualty event. The "blank pages" the surviving soldiers fire into seem to represent history: the soldiers understand that they are making an important moment in the historical record, but they don't know yet what story they are telling. Death compares the bullets to one of the languages that were spoken at Stalingrad. Many of the Germans and Russians cannot understand one another's words, so bullets become their common language. At the same time, the bullets are one more language that no one fully understands. Two soldiers may understand that they are supposed to kill one another, but the full meaning and implication of that violence is impossible for them to grasp. Not only are they blind to one another's personal reasons for shooting, but they also have no way of knowing how one soldier's death will change the course of the war. Only in retrospect will anyone be able to make sense of "The Russian, the bullets, [and] the German" altogether, and even that story will undoubtedly be riddled with mistranslations and omissions.