He is “cultured and rather insentimental man”. He does not reveal his emotion but “wept” when the Nazis invaded. During the Holocaust he and his son Elie become close and this gave him courage to survive as long as he could but unfortunately loses his faith and then got very ill after the “death march” and dies in the first night at Buchenwald.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak ranks number two on a list of “Ten Aussie Books to Read Before You Die” voted for by viewers of the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. Discuss the Significant Features of the novel that have contributed to its success, analysing and evaluating their contribution. The novel, “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak was first published in 2005. The story is set in Germany, 1939, the time of World War Two. Many significant characters are revealed though out the novel such as Death, Hans Hubermann, and Liesel Meminger.
He was a very religious person and at a young age, his faith in God is extremely strong. Elie was sent to the camp with his family and was separated from his mother and sisters, only to have his father as family, who never portrayed any emotions. He believe that at this point he seen his God die completely, and has had his faith shattered, he no longer feels as if God is acting on absolute justice. Throughout the novel Night people were treated as a whole, moved along in mass, forced to dress, act and be the same in the camps, as though the individual no longer existed and the whole herd of people had blended into one unheard mass. If only all of these people had listened to Moshe the Beadle when they had the chance, before their lives were forever changed for the worse.
By example, Jonathan shows the boys what it is to have compassion, how to forgive, and inspires them to share their love for Jesus with others. Dustin is asked by Sperry to mow the lawn of a grumpy old man across the street. Later, Dustin learns that this is the very man by whose careless actions caused the death of Sperry’s wife. Jonathan compels the boys to pray for a boy who had been stealing their pizza money and pushing them
The Book Thief Essay The book thief is an excellent story about a girl named Liesel living in Nazi Germany, except the story is narrated by death. This story is very well written, instead of the story being narrated by the main protagonist or the author himself, he has death narrate the story. The author also uses detailed imagery to paint a picture in the readers mind. Although the plot originally moves rather roughly and may seem somewhat confusing at first, once you are a few chapters in it becomes difficult to put down. I believe the author uses death as a narrator in the first few chapters to help you imagine the devastation that occurred during the holocaust.
He arrives at Mr Tom's house thinly clad, underfed and covered with painful bruises, and believing he is full of sin, as he has been brought up by a mother who regularly lashed him with a belt and was extremely religious, with strong opinions such as that people who copy go to hell when they die. However, Mr Tom, as Willie calls him, does not punish William as his mother did. In fact, Mr Tom seems to understand him, as he has never been known before. Even though Willie wets the bed for some time after he moves into the house, Mr Tom does not remonstrate him. Mr Tom and Willie just change the bedding without complaint.
(Shaffer 45) He originally “cried for days without stopping” (45) when the depiction of his god was “[torn] off the boy’s wall and [thrown into] the dustbin” (45) by his father. Alan seems to accept the replacement of “[t]he Christ …loaded down with chains, and the centurions…really laying on the stripes” (45) with a “remarkable picture” (45) of a horse with eyes “staring straight at you” (45). On one side Alan has his mother “night after night having [the bible] read into him” (34) and his father on the other side atheist, and tries “to put a stop to it” (34). The poster of a crucified Jesus represents a spiritual and sacred figure, until his father “threw it in the dustbin” (45) and replaces it with the image of a horse that seems to suffice a messiah. Alan then focuses spiritual mentality on the horse as he treats the new photo as a god-like figure when he “knelt down” (51) infront of it, and chant to it “like the bible” (50).
This theme, appearing more frequently in the epilogue discusses the kindness and cruelty of the human race while blending it with the duality of characters in the Nazi-era Germany. The analysis of these two literary elements will be discussed further throughout this paper, by not only shedding light on the history of the author, but also by helping to explore the mindsets of his characters as they progress and grow throughout the novel. Synopsis The novel beings with the introduction of Death, the narrator, walking the reader through this tumultuous time in history. Death speaks about the first few times his saw the book thief: “The book thief has struck for the first time—the beginning of an illustrious career”. The first was on a train when Death came to collect her brother, the second was when he came for a pilot who crashed his plane, and the third was after a bombing.
They walked and walked for several miles, and then they grew tired. It was time to seek rest. Now the priest had a few biscuits in his bag, and the companion he had picked had a couple of small loaves.‘Lets eat your loaves first,’ says the priest, ‘and afterwards we’ll take to the biscuits, too.’ ‘Agreed!’ replies the stranger. ‘We’ll eat my loaves, and keep your biscuits for afterwards.’ Well, they ate away at the loaves; each of them ate his fill, but the loaves got no smaller and looked never ending. The priest grew envious ‘Come,’ thinks he, ‘I’ll steal them from him!’ After the meal the old man lay down to take a nap, but the priest kept scheming how to steal the loaves from him.
When Karl Seidl finished his story, he begged the Jewish forced-laborer to forgive him. Wiesenthal, however, rose and walked out. During the next two years, Wiesenthal shared this story with fellow camp mates, ending each time with: “Was my silence at the bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong?” The incident and question so troubled Wiesenthal that, in 1946, he visited Karl Seidl’s mother in Stuttgart but left without telling the bereaved woman about her son’s misdeeds. A number of essayists chose to respond to Wiesenthal’s question thusly: “What would I have done [in Simon Wiesenthal’s place]?” Although Wiesenthal acceded to such a “paraphrase,” this writer agrees with responder Lawrence Langer that such role-playing about Holocaust reality trivializes the serious issues of judgment and forgiveness that The Sunflower raises. Forgiveness is, indeed, the essence of the debate that high scholars should enter into.