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Soliloquy
Part 5: The Losers
Explanation and Analysis:
The Book Thief has an experimental style that challenges the bounds of historical fiction. Readers will immediately notice that Zusak uses formatting—especially bold font and centered text—to set certain ideas apart from the rest of the text. The boldfaced, centered text nearly always appears under a heading in all caps that is further set off by dots on either side. For example, in Part 5: The Losers, Zusak uses this formatting to introduce "the new Arthur Berg":
*** THE NEW ARTHUR BERG ***
He had windy hair and cloudy eyes,
and he was the kind of delinquent
who had no other reason to
steal except that he enjoyed it.
His name was Viktor Chemmel.
All of this information about Viktor Chemmel could be incorporated into the main text. However, by setting it off with the formatting, Zusak turns the description into a poem or vignette for the reader to linger over longer than they otherwise might. One thing this technique does is to reproduce the way snapshots surface in a person's memory, or even the way anxious or obsessive thoughts might rise to the surface in someone's mind as they think about their role in history. All of a sudden, everything else falls away as one thought or image takes over.
Zusak also experiments with an unconventional narrator: Death himself. Death allows Zusak to play with perspective. Neither fully omniscient nor nearly as limited as the other characters in what he knows, Death somewhat approximates the perspective of a historian looking back on the events of World War II. At the same time, Death gets personally involved in the story in a way that is not quite possible for a historian. Most historians were not present for the events they study, nor are they encouraged to write extensively about their emotional responses to history. Through Death's unique perspective, Zusak taps into the idea of history as trauma that can never be resolved, but only remembered and reflected upon.
Zusak even experiments with narrative structure and time. The events of the book are sandwiched between the death of Liesel's brother and the deaths of all her family and neighbors on Himmel Street. A conventional novel might move through the plot in a linear fashion, revealing the Himmel Street bombing only at the end. Death, on the other hand, makes sure the reader knows about the bombing even before he reveals Werner's death. He then divides the novel into parts that are named after the books Liesel steals. This structure rejects the idea that people in history are defined by how they died. Death makes it clear up front that all of the characters die eventually. This gives him room to think more deeply about how they live their lives and who they are to one another.
Related Themes:
