The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

The Book Thief’s main character is Liesel Meminger throughout the book she develops more and more by opening up and doing new things. At first she was very shy and would not do hardly anything for example, “It took nearly fifteen minutes to coax her from the car. It was the tall man who did it. Quietly.”(28) That is when she first got out of the car “There was the gate next, which she clung to.”(28) This shows all the more how shy she was at the beginning of the book when she first arrived on Himmel Street. Then as the book goes on she starts to adopt her foster-mother, Rosa or Mama’s style of speaking and starts cussing some when talking to her best friend, Rudy and even the mayors wife when she terminated her mothers washing and ironing service “You give me this Saumensch of a book and it’ll make everything good when I go and tell my mama that we've just lost our last one?”(262) The underlined word is a swear her mother uses very frequently in the book. Then at last later in the book she gets so comfortable in Molching that she starts stealing books from the mayor’s mansion “She couldn't tolerate having it given to her by a lonely pathetic old woman. Stealing it on the other hand seemed a little more acceptable.”(287) This is from the first book she stole titled The Whistler. As the story goes on more she develops even more stealing food and more books as well as growing to love Rudy and spend more time with Max, the Jewish man the hide from the Nazis, and talks like her mother more and more.

The main Theme of the book thief is the power of words and how they can affect people. In the story max wrote Liesel a book called the word shaker it explains that Hitler or the Fuhrer, (the name they refer to hitler as in the book, it is g...

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...art.”(242)

Denotative- Death das a heart.

Connotative-everybody cares about something no matter what.

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9.”She gave 'The Dream Carrier' to Max as if words alone could nourish him.”(164)

Denotative- Liesel gave max the dream carrier like the words could make him better.

Connotative- Liesel cared about max and really wanted him to get better.

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10.”One was a book thief. The other stole the sky.”(381)

Denotative-one person stole books the other stole the sky.

Connotative- Max loved the outside and wanted to be there instead of being stuck in a basement and Liesel loved books and wanted more to read so she didn’t have to read the ones she had even more times.

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