Death was a Great Narrator of the Story

Death was a great narrator of the story, he grasped your attention by telling you things that would make you want to read the next line. Not a lot of narrators can do that. Death is sought out as a terrible creature that takes lives for amusement, but in all reality he isn’t. He is like the rest of us, human. He says, “You want to know what I truly look like?” I’ll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue”(Markus Zusak).Many people don’t understand that death is just one of us. Death has a job that he has to do, even if he doesn’t want to, he has to. This job though comes with its own requirements. He must take souls from people’s dying bodies every time. Overall, death has his flaws and he shows many different sides of himself. He can be sympathetic, considerate, and candid at times throughout The Book Thief. Sometimes he can be pretty straightforward with different things.

He is caring towards Liesel her entire life. Even at the end he wanted to tell her things about her life but he chose the simpler way. He told her, “I am haunted by humans”(pg. 584). He’s showing that some of the people he has looked over, he didn’t want them to die, or die the way they did. He always looked back at how Rudy was, he was a kind young boy who cared for everyone around him. He was sympathetic for Liesel because he knew her story, he went through it with her. All of her ups and downs, he was by her. The deaths that surrounded her made Death always show up in places by her side.

Death didn’t take the dying people as dead people. He took them and was considerate towards them. “ Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them of their fear”(Markus Zusak). He knew that the ones killed during the Holocaust didn’t deserve it. He wanted to make them as comfortable as possible by lying by their sides and helping them take in every last breath. In that time frame, there was more than just death, there was Death himself having to go through with his job and take every last one of them. A toll was taken on Death, he was taking innocent lives, for a reason that only a few agreed was right.

There are times in The Book Thief when Death can be very straightforward with everything going on. “Of course I’m being rude. I’m spoiling the ending, not only the entire ending, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don’t have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story” (pg. 263). He spoils it to show us that things don’t always happen in the order we want them to. He shows that something’s can happen because of one person and that there are consequences from that person. Death leaves us wondering what will happen other than the major events he foreshadows. He say, “I am no violent. I am not malicious. I am a result”(Markus Zusak). He wanted us to know that he is that the one that kills he’s the one that results in the deaths.

Death has shown us through an astounding story. He wasn’t just death he was a person, a person telling a story from his own perspective. He found the book and told the story. Most might say death is death but Death is not what we all expected, he is much more. He isn’t the one that wants this to happen, that us human beings, wee control what we think, by projecting it off of other people. Death has a job to take souls at a price no one wants to pay. “The trouble is, who could ever replace me? Who could step in while I take a break in your stock-standard resort-style vacation destination, whether it be tropical or of a ski trip variety? The answer, of course, is nobody, which has prompted me to make a conscious, deliberate decision— to make distraction my vacation. Needless to say, I vacation in increments. In colors.”(Markus Zusak). He can’t quit or stop, it’s the way of life. This is the part no one can stop. Though there are ways to for him to look at everything differently. Again, he’s like the rest of us, no matter what anyone else say,he is a man with a job that never gets easy.

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