How Is Death Used In The Book Thief

Markus Zusak’s ‘The Book Thief’ is narrated by Death who describes the story of a nine year old German girl called Liesel Meminger. She was given by her mother to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann in the small town of Molching in 1939. In this novel, Death is interested by humans and the colours of the world, but he struggles to decode how humans are capable of so much beauty but at the same time ugliness. Death shows an interest in Liesel’s story and describes the incidents in her life. His opinions are mostly on his understanding of humans and bold texts are used in the novel to correct humans understanding of him.
Firstly, in the prologue, Markus Zusak has used bold text to disrupt the reader and to directly communicate with the reader. For example, “HERE IS A SMALL
Evidence for this is “Personally, I like a chocolate-coloured sky. Dark, dark chocolate.”(14) The use of the simple sentence suggests that Death is bitter like ‘dark chocolate’ and you cannot change his decision when he comes to you, just like you cannot change the flavour of the solid ‘dark chocolate’. This suggests that Death is heartless, mean-spirited and unsympathetic. The use of the adverb “Personally” connotes that Death has an opinion which can be supported by “Still, it’s possible that you might be asking, Why does he even need a holiday?”(15) Therefore, through this voice it is explicit that Death also likes adventure and is almost human-like which enables him to describe scenes in the novel and his emotions which allows him to have a distinct personality. Furthermore, this makes Death a divergent narrator because the readers see the story from a different perspective with Death’s narration, which provides them with the emotions of all the characters in the novel and the information that Liesel herself would not have acknowledged if she was the