Summary
“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness” (84). In the beginning, we are introduced to the narrator by the name of Death. He informs the readers that he has many stories, but only remembers the ones that interest him. The tale of Liesel Meminger is one such tale, as he was always fascinated by her will to live through the most horrible instances. It should be duly noted however, that this story does not have a happy ending. Death makes this clear before we even have a chance to get our hopes up. He tells us that everyone dies; the amount of time that they last is truly the only difference. After this sordid fact is in place, he mentions just Liesel first attracted his attention.
It was on a train with Liesel’s mother and brother where they were travelling when death made his first appearance in the book thief’s life. He took the soul of her brother and only glanced at the girl truly, not taking real note of her as he did his job. She knew that her brother was dead at that point, but the shock wouldn’t truly take her until she snatched a book from where it had fallen near her brother’s hastily made grave. After he was buried, Liesel and her mother continued on their way, arriving at the town of Molching, where she met Hans and Rosa Hubermann. In the first few months that she had arrived, nightmares plagued her mind, haunting her with images of Werner, her brother, and his cold dead eyes. Hans is the one to comfort her, and because of this she grows to trust in him and truly view him as her father. She enjoys his company as well, for he can play the accordion and is always smiling and winking at her in a joyous way. He also begins to teach her how to read the book that she picked up on the day d...
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...by American bombers and everyone but Liesel dies on the street. Liesel only survives because she was writing a book of her own, and was in the basement when the bombs struck. When she is rescued by the police, she rushes to find her parents and Rudy, but only finds them both dead. The story ends with her being adopted by Ilsa Hermann. Of course, this does not mean the story is over; there is an epilogue. Max survives the war and later finds his way back to Liesel, who rejoices when they finally meet. When Liesel finally dies, death takes her away from the others and shows her the book that she was writing when the bombs fell. She asks him if he understood the meaning of it, to which he responds with his own sage advice. When death takes her soul away for good this time, and takes one last look at the title of the book. The Book Thief by Liesel Meminger.
Part One: The first book that Liesel “stole” was The Grave Digger's Handbook. This is ironic because it was the day that her brother died and it was the last time she saw her mother. Himmel Street is ironic because Himmel= Heaven and Himmel Street did
Hans can’t help to offer a piece of bread to one of the prisoners and is beaten along with the prisoner for this act of nobility. He is frightened that the Nazi will search his house and discover Max. That same night Max leaves Himmel Street. Hans is sent to war as his punishment and Alex Steiner is also conscripted for not permitting Rudy be part of a special training school. With Hans and Max gone, Liesel does her best to go on. She reads to the inhabitants of Himmel Street in the bomb shelter during air raids, robs food with Rudy, and helps Rosa who is devastated by Hans’s departure. The last book she steals is called “The Last Human Stranger” at this point she is frustrated and
Finding beauty in ugly situations was a theme that was very key in the development of the Book Thief. This can be seen many times in the text and really brings the whole story together. Keeping a positive attitude in a bad situation and finding the good things is what keeps Liesel’s happiness. She may not have the best life yet she has a very positive outlook on life. It doesn’t matter the situation, you can always find happiness.
This is a story of courage, companionship, affection, survival, decease, and sorrow. This is Liesel’s life on Himmel Street, narrated by Death. There are two major themes in this book that are experienced at any point of time in everyone’s life. Those themes are “Survivor’s Guilt” and “Abandonment”. This book should be read by everyone. This book has a lot of themes that is beneficial for people in their lives. I feel that this book is interestingly written for an important piece of history.
Liesel Meminger was a very bright girl that didn’t have the resources to flourish. Her mother must hide from the Nazis because she is a communist and sends Liesel ...
Liesel’s mom leaves her with foster parents because she wishes to protect her from the fate she is enduring. The words Paula, Liesel’s mom, uses go against Hitler because she is a communist which resulted in her being taken away and Liesel to lose her mother and experience the loss of her. This shows Liesel experiences unhappiness because of her mother’s disappearance which is caused by the words she openly uses that contradicts Hitler.
In every novel each narrator has a unique way of them expressing the story in different ways. The author of Flowers For Algernon is Daniel Keyes and the narrator is the protagonist of the book, named Charlie Gordon. Charlie is a 32-year-old mentally disabled man who went through a surgical procedure to increase his intelligence. Toward the end of the book, Charlie’s intelligence started to vanish and he spends all his time with Alice, until he returns to his original state which then he resides in the Warren state home. The author of The Book Thief is Markus Zusak and the narrator is death. The Book Thief is a novel about the story of Liesel Meminger, a nine-year-old German girl who lives with her foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann in the town of Molching. Hans agrees to hide a Jew named Max Vandenburg in his basement. Liesel writes the story of her life in the Hubermanns basement, where she survives an air raid that kills everyone else on her block. The narrator of a novel is significant because of he, she, or it takes on the responsibility of shaping the story for the reader.
The Book Thief’s main character is Liesel Meminger throughout the book she develops more and more by opening up and doing new things. At first she was very shy and would not do hardly anything for example, “It took nearly fifteen minutes to coax her from the car. It was the tall man who did it. Quietly.”(28) That is when she first got out of the car “There was the gate next, which she clung to.”(28) This shows all the more how shy she was at the beginning of the book when she first arrived on Himmel Street. Then as the book goes on she starts to adopt her foster-mother, Rosa or Mama’s style of speaking and starts cussing some when talking to her best friend, Rudy and even the mayors wife when she terminated her mothers washing and ironing service “You give me this Saumensch of a book and it’ll make everything good when I go and tell my mama that we've just lost our last one?”(262) The underlined word is a swear her mother uses very frequently in the book. Then at last later in the book she gets so comfortable in Molching that she starts stealing books from the mayor’s mansion “She couldn't tolerate having it given to her by a lonely pathetic old woman. Stealing it on the other hand seemed a little more acceptable.”(287) This is from the first book she stole titled The Whistler. As the story goes on more she develops even more stealing food and more books as well as growing to love Rudy and spend more time with Max, the Jewish man the hide from the Nazis, and talks like her mother more and more.
This is when Liesel is being dropped off at her new home without her Mother and shows that she is hurt and saddened by the losses of her family. She also feels sad that her brother had to die and not her. Liesel eventually starts to recover but continues to write to her birth Mother and sees visions of her dead brother in her dreams. Liesel is known throughout the book for speaking phrases such as “I cannot lose you”. Finally when she accepts that she will never see her family again another tragedy strikes. Bombs arrive at her home on Himmel Street killing everyone including her foster parents and best friend. Liesel survives the bombing but is once again left alone with the sadness of being a survivor. This is especially hard for her to recover from because she felt terrible being the only one to
The story begins with Liesel and her brother on a train being taken to a distant land. Sadly her brother dies on the journey, and they bury him when the train stops. At the burial sight, as one of the grave diggers walks away an object falls from his coat. “There was something black and rectangular lodged in the snow. Only the girl saw it. She bent down and picked it up and held it firmly in her fingers. The book had silver writing on it” (Zusak 16). When Liesel grabbed the The Grave Digger’s Handbook, it wasn’t her intention to read, she didn’t even know how to
In the novel, The Book Thief, Death is the narrator of the story, and follows around the protagonist, Liesel Meminger, as she lives in Nazi Germany, and how her life changes when a Jewish man named Max Vandenburg shows up at her door, taking refuge in Liesel and her foster parent’s basement. Markus Zusak’s choice as Death influences many themes of the story, where if Liesel or an unnamed narrator wouldn’t have the same influence.
Books helped Liesel bring comfort to others, in one occasion Liesel reads to the other residents of Himmel Street in the bomb shelter during the air raids to try and calm the people down and make them feel safe. She finds comfort in books even when she gives up books; when Ilsa gives the blank book to Liesel she begins writing The Book Thief, the story of her life. Books saved her life, the only reason she was still alive after the bombing of Himmel Street was that she was staying up to edit. Throughout Liesel's life books helped her create relationships, resist against the Nazi regime, gain power and confidence over her words, soothe people, make refuge, and even saved her
In the beginning of the book, Liesel is seen as an innocent uneducated young girl, but then starts to go through numerous tragedies. Such as the death of her brother, abandonment of her mother and the absence of her real father. Liesel then starts to steal and read books as an escapism because of the loss of her brother. She then joins a stealing gang, in which she continues to steal fruits, vegetables and other important foods from farms. “Twenty-four hours later, Liesel and Rudy braved the wire fence again and filled their sack. The problem showed up as they made their getaway. Christ! shouted Arthur. The farmer! It was his next word, however, that frightened. He called it out as if he’d already been attacked with it. His mouth ripped open. The word flew out, and the word was ax.” (Zusak 164). Liesel is now taking the food she steals for granted, in which she does not care if she gets in trouble. She is simply acting out. This leads her to doing wrongful things to gain more power, like stealing more books from the mayor's library to gain more knowledge. “The injury of words. Yes, the brutality of words. She summoned them from someplace she only now recognized and hurled them at Ilsa Hermann. “It’s about time,” she informed her, “that you do your stinking washing anyway. It’s about time you faced the fact that your son is dead. He got killed! He got strangled and
Even though the style of writing is simple and direct, it does a good job conveying the different themes of the story, including the different conflicts between politics and religion, separation of families, death, and etc. The power of words is shown as soon as Liesel learns how to read. Her will for prosperity and curiosity becomes more powerful with every word she learns. She realizes that words, through cruel and wicked manners, can be impact people to force acts of brutality. During the burial of her baby brother, she finds her first book, the grave digger’s manual. Even though liesel couldn’t read at the moment, she knows the memories its words
The main character Liesel, known as “the book thief” is who Death is looking over. Liesel, her mother, and brother are on a train to Munich. On the train ride her brother dies. She and her mother get off the train to bury him. The first book Liesel steals is from the gravediggers. They continue the journey to a town called Molching, where Liesel will be raised by foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Liesel adjusts to her new home life. Hans teaches Liesel how to read. The war is escalating in Germany. The town holds a book-burning to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. That’s when Liesel steals another book from the flames. Liesel’s job is to deliver laundry to the Hermann family. The Hermanns’ have a library full of books. Liesel is allowed to read them in the study. Meanwhile, a German-Jew named Max needs help, so he seeks out the Hubermanns. Max hides in the basement, so he is safe from the Nazis. Liesel begins stealing books from the Hermanns. The Nazis parade the Jews through the town of Molching on their way to the concentration camp for everyone to see. Liesel is given a blank notebook to write her own story. One night the neighborhood is bombed. Hans, Rosa, and the rest of the neighborhood is killed. Rescue workers find Liesel under the rubble. She leaves behind her finished book, called The Book Thief. Death, who has been watching, rescues the book. Liesel ends up living with the mayor