Narrative+Features+and+Structure+in+The+Book+Thief


 * Death – an interesting narrator (RYN) **

The following notes and questions take into account ideas from // The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative // by H. Porter Abbott, Cambridge University Press 2008, ISBN 978-0-521-71515-7, a text written for undergraduate and graduate courses on literary theory and criticism.

Whose voice do we hear mostly as we read the novel? Is the voice that of ‘a character-like entity’ created by the author as a ‘mask’ for Zusak to wear in print? Or is Death a pseudo character, positioned somewhere between narrator and character? As such, Death can be seen as an interesting literary device. Is Death a reliable or unreliable narrator?

Is Death simply a manifestation or personification of ideas, when his voice is so arresting? (Part 6, Death’s Diary’: ‘In all honesty and I know I’m complaining excessively now’… I was till getting over Stalin, in Russia…. Then came Hitler.”) Is Death not to some extent a ‘humanlike entity’? Characters, as defined by H.Porter Abbott, are ‘any entities involved in the action that have agency’.

Could we regard Death as a narrator who shares some of the features of a character? A narrator-character? Death has a distinct ‘voice’ and personality, and ‘acts’ in the limbo of time when ‘the fingers of her soul touched the story that was written so long ago’ by rescuing her dusty copy of 'The Book Thief' and placing it where she will find it on the kerbside in Anzac Avenue. He 'inter-acts' with Leisel by telling her, during 'the great pause' which marks her last moments, ‘I am haunted by humans’. We might argue that Leisel is already dead when this event takes place. He ‘took her away’, indicating she had already died, yet she asks Death a question, ‘Did you read it?’ She does not look at Death when he replies. She seems to be in a state of transition between life and afterlife. Death seems to sit in a similar twilight zone. So, if Death acts, reacts to, and interacts with Leisel, is he not a character? He is not a 'flat character', a featureless cardboard, one dimensional figure, who is emotionally neutral. He is more than the standard first person narrator. He is too close to Leisel for that.

H. Porter Abbott use the term narrative ‘distance’ in two senses: How distant is Death from Leisel?
 * 1) 1. The narrator’s emotional distance from the characters and the action (the degree of his involvement in the story.
 * 2) 2. The distance between the narrator’s moral, emotional or intellectual sensibilities, and those of the implied author’.

Extract from an interview with Markus Zusak by John Ydstie:
====ZUSAK:She steals books at a time when people were captivated by Adolph Hitler, and in a way she's stealing words back. He was destroying people with words, and she steals books from book burnings and all types of other places, and she shares these stories with the young Jewish man hiding in her basement, and she reads them in the bomb shelters to calm people down.====

YDSTIE: What made you decide to have Death himself, or Death itself, narrate this story?
====ZUSAK: Well, I thought I'm writing a book about war, and there's that old adage that war and death are best friends, but once you start with that idea, then I thought, well, what if it's not quite like that? Then I thought what if death is more like thinking, well, war is like the boss at your shoulder, constantly wanting more, wanting more, wanting more, and then that gave me the idea that Death is weary, he's fatigued, and he's haunted by what he sees humans do to each other because he's on hand for all of our great miseries.====

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H. Porter Abbott states that ‘Narrative is the representation of an event or series of events’. Let’s apply this to the interrupted sequence of events in the novel.
 * Narrative Structure **

In // The Book Thief, // the narrative is interrupted with visually distinct micro narratives, lyrical observations and comments about events and characters. These interruptions might be described as ‘embedded narratives’ or a story within a story, framed by the larger narrative. One such micro narrative is the opening of Leisel’s own book, ‘The Book Thief’: ‘Page 1. I try to ignore it, but I know this all started with the train and the snow and my coughing brother. I stole my first book that day…’ Alternatively, a few of these interruptions might fit the category ** metalepsis, ** ‘a **violation of narrative levels**’, e.g. an authorial intrusion in the flow of the narrative – but in this case, an intrusion by the narrator, Death. Visually, these interruptions look like a motif – a recurring image.

Porter Abbot states ‘Narrative discourse is infinitely malleable. It can expand and contract, leap backward and forward, but as we take in information from the discourse we sort it out in our minds, reconstructing an order of events that we call the story… The story is always mediated – by a voice, a style of writing, camera angles, actors’ interpretations – so that what we call the story is really something that we construct. We put it together from what we read or see, often by inference.’ ( pp 17 – 20) In the case of // The Book Thief, // voice and writing style are parts of the construction we work with as we assemble Leisel’s story from Death’s narrative.

Zusak uses the following structural devices in crafting the narrative:
 * Prolepsis (flash forward): ** Ironically, and counter-intuitively, Zusak uses this to create suspense. He uses ‘spoilers’. In Part five, ‘The Floating Book’, Death interrupts the narrative with the announcement, ‘Rudy…didn’t deserve to die the way he did.’ Effect? This increases the sense of foreboding.

In the Prologue, ‘The Flag’ Death refers to ‘The last time I saw her’ as she knelt in the rubble of the bomb blast that destroys Molching, clutching, and then dropping her book, ‘The Book Thief’. This is the one she authored, her ‘most precious item’. Death reports that he ‘climbed aboard’ the garbage truck to retrieve the book he would then read ‘several hundred times’, marvelling at Leisel’s survival. The rest of the narrative describes the unfolding events that she had chronicled in her book. So ‘The Flag’ is set in a narrative mid-point ( ** in medias res ** ), while the Epilogue records events after the war and provides closure. Both sections reinforce Death’s stand that Leisel’s story haunts him: ‘I am haunted by humans’ (an oxymoron).

In Part ten, ‘The End of the World’, Death gives another flash forward, this time reflecting on why he does so: ‘Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it’s to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare myself for the telling.’


 * Analepsis (Flash back): ** In a sense, the whole narrative is a flashback. In the Epilogue, Death interrupts with the news flash: ‘A Last Fact: I should tell you that the book thief died only yesterday.’

Hence, the narrative is not chronological. Effect? For human beings, death occupies a continuous present. Therefore, Death is not bound by time frames. Deaths interrupt life (much like the motif’s in the novel), so the non-sequential narrative discourse reflects this fact of life.

He also places stories within stories within stories e.g. the story Max wrote for Leisel on the pages of Mein Kampf, within the pages of the book she wrote, ‘The Book Thief’, the novel Death finds so arresting, and whence he gets some of his information about her life, within the pages of the text penned for us by Zusak.