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The Book Thief Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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In The Book Thief, the author, Markus Zusak writes a beautiful story following a young German girl named Liesel who experiences the atrocities that occur during World War II. Early in the book, she is given by her mother to foster parents who raise her as their own. During her childhood, she begins stealing books and learns about the power of words. Throughout the story, she bonds with many people including her neighbors, her foster parents and a Jew hidden in their basement. Most of the characters end up dying due to the horrible living conditions and time period the book takes place in. In The Book Thief, Markus Zusak uses first person point of view, a dark tone and pathos to reveal the harsh reality that citizens of Germany suffered through …show more content…

In the beginning of the book, the first huge tragedy takes place when Liesel’s brother dies and Liesel reacts in the following manner, “Perhaps ten meters to my left, the pale, empty-stomached girl was standing, frost-stricken. Her mouth jittered. Her cold arms were folded. Tears were frozen to the book thief’s face” (Zusak, 8). In this scene where Liesel loses her brother, she’s devastated and it’s one of those scenes where you just kind of get really sad reading it. Some people who are maybe a little more in touch with their emotions might shed a tear or two. As a reader, you just feel really bad for Liesel and you might start making connections to your own siblings. Sometimes I think when a lot of people read about horrible events that have taken place, such as the Holocaust, where people died or were injured, they don’t think about the fact that these were real people, or just don’t care enough to because it wasn’t somebody with any significance to them. Each one of these people who were killed had a mother and father and could have had siblings, cousins and children of their own. When most of these people died, they had family or friends grieving over their passing. A lot of readers when they realize this, might turn their sadness into anger, specifically towards the cause of all this mayhem, Adolf Hitler. I applaude Zusak as an author because if it was his motive at all to target Hitler, he succeeded. Scenes like this really give readers insight on the Holocaust. Near the end of the book, Liesel has to cope with the overwhelmingly painful deaths of everyone on Himmel Street, “She began to rock back and forth. A shrill, quiet, smearing note was caught somewhere in her mouth until she was finally able to turn” (Zusak, 537). The scene where Liesel loses her brother is sad, however we didn’t get the

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