Power In The Book Thief

Throughout The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, the Nazis strip Liesel’s power from her, and she picks up the pieces to empower herself and get back on her feet. Death, a gregarious figure who watches over the girl’s life, narrates the story. He has the arduous task of collecting souls, but he watches colors and special humans to distract him from the labor. Liesel starts out as a frail, helpless child who doesn’t know her place in the world. All of her loved ones abandon her, and she has no power at all. Her life is an utter tragedy, and she unwillingly moves to a diverse town of foreign strangers. Throughout the entirety of the novel, Liesel slowly regains power in various ways. She forms inseparable bonds with her friends and family members

The Nazis seize her parents because they are Communists, and Liesel and Werner, her brother, ride on a train to live with a new family. During the train ride, her brother dies from the long term effects of their maltreatment. After the death of her brother, she loses her self-confidence because all of her loved ones are gone, and she feels powerless. Liesel and her mother deboard the train to participate in Werner’s burial in the midst of the frost-stricken winter. Death observes many moments of Liesel’s life, and he associates colors with the three major encounters. The burial of Werner marks the initial confrontation in “the blinding, white-snow sky” (Zusak 8). Liesel is symbolically blinded because she has to aimlessly enter an exceedingly different world of strangers and foreign places. The symbolization of white relates to the destructiveness and emptiness that Liesel feels in this situation. In this single day, she loses all of her family and leaves behind all of her world as she knows it, which is tragically destructive to Liesel. White embodies the emptiness she feels inside since Werner and Liesel are supposed to face this new life together, but without him, she feels empty and alone. Amongst the destructive abandonment, “the pale, empty-stomached girl was standing, frost-stricken” (9), lost in her own desertion. The frost indicates the entity of death, as well as a coldness of heart. Liesel is portrayed as frozen because death is constantly intertwining with her life, and the light in her heart burns out. When Death comes to take Werner’s soul, “a suddenness found its way onto his lips then, which were a corroded brown color and peeling, like old paint” (20). The brown color of his lips exemplifies the heaviness that is left on Liesel’s shoulders, tearing her down. She needs to have her brother with her throughout this journey to help