Post #3

Markus Zusak, the author of The Book Thief, constantly uses personification to enhance his writing and because the narrator, Death, is a personification itself. I personally really like that so much of the book is told from the eyes of someone that doesn’t even exist. It forces me to use my imagination and come up with my own ideas about what Death looks like, for example, or how he acts.

Zuzak also uses figurative language quite often to describe things more vividly. It was not hard at all for me to find a good example of this in the reading, because Zusak uses these literary elements so frequently. One example that I found is when Liesel is described as “…watching the stray ash and the corpse of collected books”(pg. 114). I liked this not only because it is a very unique way to describe a pile of books, but also because it connects to the underlying theme of death in the novel. Later in this paragraph, Death says, “Orange and red embers looked like rejected candy,” (pg. 114). This is also a good example of the descriptive and figurative way that Zuzak describes images to us, so they can be seen more vividly in our minds as we read. Overall, I really enjoy Zuzak’s writing style and her endless use of figurative language and personification.