The Book Thief

Paragraph Response

1. What impression does death give of himself? Death is surprisingly similar to the humans, which gets expression when he repetedly says that he doesn’t always like his job and sometimes wants holidays. This and the fact that he describes collecting dead souls as his job makes him surprisingly close to a normal person. The usual image of death is a really bad person that likes seeing dead people and their souls and he is a really dark, mystery person. In the Book Thief he describes himself as a normal person with an unnormal job, which makes the reader try to find out what death really is. Another fact is that death uses colours to describe everything. Maybe he does that to help himself out of all the darkness he has to deal with in his life or it is supposed to show that he is not even as dark as everybody thinks. Is he a person that nobody knows about being the death or is he somewhere above us and we will never see him until we die? On the other hand side, in the book death knows everything about every person, which makes him special and less like a normal person. Death in the book is described in two ways. On the one hand side as the mystery and dark person and on the other hand side as a normal human being with a very special job. The reader has to really think about death and needs to see how death develops as the story continues and the reader is challenged to find out who death really is. After the first 100 pages it is not really possible to see his position in the story.

2)   Death sais that Hans Hubermann belongs to the „10 percent that did not support                Adolf Hitler“(pg. 63), which makes him a special character because the reader wants to find out if he supports Hitler later in the story or if he stays resistant to  the Nazi party. The reader does not really know much about Hans Hubermann and it makes him confusing that he spends the whole night in Liesel’s room and the quote „He had already cheated me in one war but would later be put into another( as a perverse of reward) shows that even death does not know how to think about Hans Huber. „Heil Hitler“, the Nazi salute that everyone used to say was never said by Hans Hubermann, but after he applied for joining the Nazi Party he said it more and more often and later even made Liesel say it. He is more and more attracted by the Nazi party but he still does not share all of their opinions. The number ten in this case is special because everyone used to support Hitler, if they did it because they wanted to or if they were scared of resisiting the party, 90 percent of the German population at that time supported Hitler and the Nazis.