The book thief paragraph – pg 3 – 15

“First the colours. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things. Or at least how I try.” Here, at the start of the book, this is deaths (the narrators) way of telling us that colours are going to be of great significance throughout the book. The prologue was broken into three parts, and the first sentence of each of these starts with a colour. “First up is something white. Of the blinding kind.” “Next is a signature black, to show the poles of my versatility, if you like.” “The last time I saw her was red.” Red, White and Black are some of the colours typically associated with Nazi Germany because they are the colours of the swastica. The fact that these colours are placed where they are in the book related leads us to believe that all of the deaths that death saw ‘the book thief’ near were elated to the Nazis. “- and the last scrawl from above formed what, to me, appeared an odd, yet familiar, shape. A signature.” Death recognising the signature (swastica) showed that even at the early stages of the war there had already been a lot of Nazi-related deaths. Death tries not to get involved with human life, he just goes about his job. He also doesn’t see death as a good or bad thing. In fact, I don’t think he has a concept of what is good or bad. I think he doesn’t know about the Nazis yet because he just doesn’t get involved. Neutrality