The Book Thief Rhetorical Analysis

Writer Markus Zusak’s number one best-selling book The Book Thief written in 2005 demonstrates a story about a young German girl living in Nazi Germany. Zusak’s purpose of the story is to describe life growing up in Germany during World War II. He uses a serious tone to describe his reader's rhetorical devices that can have a deeper meaning. This can be demonstrated through the use of Symbolism, Imagery, and even Liesel herself. In The Book Thief, various rhetorical devices are used to develop the theme that words have a powerful meaning in the novel. The first example of a rhetorical device is symbolism. In the story Max wrote, The word shakers, Max explains how people who were word shakers, had the most powerful things to say. In Max’s story, he states “The best word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words, they were the ones who could climb the highest” (Zusak 446). This portrays that word shakers symbolize people who have words that have an impactful meaning. This means that the people who had the most powerful words, put that into other people's heads, which raises the power of propaganda. To summarize, word shakers symbolize their powerful impact on others.

Death explains the color black. Death uses the color black “...to show the poles of my versatility, if you like. It was the darkest moment before the dawn” (Zusak 9). This demonstrates how the color black created an image of mourning and death. World War II was a dark time, so Death uses the color black to illustrate how dark these times were. He creates an image in the reader's mind to give each person a deep image of what the setting may look like. Death uses describing words to also have an emotional appeal. Using certain colors may describe a certain emotion, such as Black. Black illustrates the sadness going on throughout the whole book. In summary, the color black symbolizes imagery throughout the