PURPOSE OF THE BOOK THIEF: Howe we dismiss the Nazi Holocaust as a horror from history when the people who performed these atrocities are real just like us.

HOW: Zusak uses the techniques of magical realism to unsettle us and undermind our preconceptions.

‘Analyse how language features were used to deepen your understanding of a theme’

“Apart from everything else, the book thief wanted desperately to go back to the basement, to write, or to read through her story one last time. In hindsight, I see it so obviously on her face. She was dying for it – the safety, the home of it – but she could not move. Also, the basement no longer existed. It was part of the mangled landscape.”

“I waved.

No-one waved back.”

“He had already cheated me in one world war, but would later be put into another (as a perverse kind of reward) where he would somehow manage to avoid me again”

n his novel, “The Book Thief”, Markus Zusak communicates his ideas about the vulnerability of all societies to colluding in atrocities by re-framing the events of the Nazi Holocaust in the mid-20th century. Like many texts in the genre of Magical Realism, a variety of techniques are used by Zusak to help the reader to look at something familiar with new eyes. Zusak uses language features throughout the novel to help deepen our understanding of the novel’s theme. One of these language features he uses in the novel is the personification of death. He uses this to help show how we dismiss the holocaust as a horrific event but fail to address the fact that the people who executed these events were just like us.