Select quotations in the text that reveal important information about the narrator Death. Explain what these quotations tell you about this character and reflect on the author’s purpose in the lines you have chosen: What was Markus Zusak wanting to convey through these lines? How does this representation assist to develop ideas, events, the setting purposefully in the text? How does this representation affect our understanding, feelings or thoughts as a reader?

“People observe the colours of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colours. Waxy yellow, cloud spot blues. Murky darkness. In my point of work I make it a point to notice.” 

I feel that death is an observer of many things. Throughout the text Markus Zusak uses death to narrate the story personifying him and using him like a guardian to watch over diesel. Death wanted to enjoy the small things about a person such as the lightness of their souls, their last thoughts, and the colours that surrounded them when they passed. I feel that liesel could have been the brightest or most intricate shade of a colour that continued to entice death to watch and observe her. He was always there. Death was not only a narrator but a common theme throughout liesels life. It was her brother first. Starting with the colour white. The colour is consistently shown throughout the text in many ways. “A day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations with each passing moment” shows that every colour will only be shown once because there are a million types of it. White represents the cold snowy day liesel’s little brother died but it also represents the nazi soldiers that roamed the streets at that time. This is just one example but it is one of the ways that death helps to assist us in understanding the text. Death says ” In my point of work I make it a point to notice. ” which gives us the impression that sometimes the collection of souls can be so depressing, for sometimes he knows that people are running straight to him and they will fight to get away at the same time.  ‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies’, said Jojen. ‘The man who never reads lives only one. The singers of the forest had no books. No ink, no parchment, no written language. Instead they had the trees, and the weirwoods above all. When they died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered.’” (George R. R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons) Death wanted something to encourage him to be around because he became one of the most evil man’s allies. He collected all of Hitlers killing spree. So death found the girl who spoke through her eyes, she read one thousand lives through books so when she falls in the hands of Death he will carry something so precious. He will carry all of the shades of colour. And he will notice every single one of them.     

 

 

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