Loneliness In Markus Zusak's The Book Thief

Loneliness. Love. Two emotions that often go hand in hand. Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, hides this in his work. Often, when a person loves someone, they never want to let them go. They never want to be lonely. But eventually, the person leaves them. Either by death, boredom, work, outside forces, suspicion or heartbreak, that person will leave, and they will be left alone, in the dark, with no one to hold. No one to turn to. No one to love them. The loneliness they will feel will crush them, because of one fact, one statement that no one can deny. The people a person loves will always leave them, despite their struggles. In the beginning, it starts with one thing that is truly irreplaceable. Family. The ones that are with us from

28). The young girl refuses to believe the fact that she knows is true. Her mother was gone. Her mother had left her in the darkness, the string hanging just out of her reach. “There was the gate next, which she clung to. A gang of tears trudged from her eyes as she held on and refused to go inside.” The darkness. The crushing weight of loneliness. And the refusal to believe that this was her new life, that her mom was gone. Liesel’s time on Himmel Street did indeed get better, but the young girl still was not ready to be alone that early in her life. She didn’t even know her real father. All she knew was that he was gone, and there was a word people used to describe him. “And that word. That strange word was always there somewhere, standing in the corner, watching from the dark. It wore suits, uniforms. No matter where they went, there it was, each time her father was mentioned. She could smell it and taste it. She just couldn’t spell or understand it” (pg. 31). The word? Communist. All Liesel knew about her father, was that he was a communist. And she didn’t know how to feel about it. How could someone have an opinion on something if she never knew what it meant? Later though, Liesel discovers something.