Abstract
This article examines the consolatory possibilities presented by Markus Zusak’s recent crossover novel The Book Thief, investigating the degree to which the novel delivers the simultaneous consolation and confrontation identified with children’s and young adults’ Holocaust texts by such critics as Adrienne Kertzer and Lawrence Baron. Contending that the supernatural nature of the novel’s redemptive imagery ultimately undermines its apparently consolatory purpose, the article concludes with an analysis of the extent to which such a reading is complicated by the novel’s status as crossover text, and the triangular gaze that might subsequently be attributed to its adult readers.
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Notes
In attempting to explain the emergence of this idea, Kidd (2005) states that “[p]resumably the exposure model became necessary because we no longer have the luxury of denying the existence of or postponing the child’s confrontation with evil” (pp. 120–121).
Although Zusak’s Death does not claim any specific gender, I will use the male pronoun to refer to the narrator as, within the text, Max refers to Death as male (p. 204).
While the afterlife itself is not clearly elaborated in The Book Thief, its existence is strongly implicit both in the souls’ survival of their physical deaths and in the novel’s occasional (if equivocal) references to God (e.g. p. 373).
Alison Waller (2009, p. 6) has suggested the resistance of the idea of adolescence to such identifications and investments, indicating its status as “a liminal space onto which a distinct dichotomy of desires and fears cannot easily be projected.”
Liesel’s illiteracy at the beginning of the novel provides another example of this slippage, again attributing to her one of the characteristics of a much younger child.
On the topic of the adult desire for a happy ending in young people’s literature, see also Hamida Bosmajian (2002, p. 135).
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Jenni Adams is an associate university teacher at the University of Sheffield, England. Her research addresses the topic of magic realist representation in Holocaust literature.
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Adams, J. “Into Eternity’s Certain Breadth”: Ambivalent Escapes in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief . Child Lit Educ 41, 222–233 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9111-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9111-2