Boy In The Striped Pajamas Movie And Book Comparison Essay

The majority of movies stay true to their previously written novel, but this is not the case for the novel and film of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas. The mediums of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas are about a young boy named Bruno who moves from Berlin to Out-With (Auschwitz). As he goes exploring, Bruno “discovers” a boy his age named Shmuel. Sadly, the boys are separated by a large fence. What Bruno does not know though, is that that fence is there to divide his people from Shmuel’s because of their vastly different ways. While that is the main focus of both pieces, the novel The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is evidently different to its movie counterpart, and these distinctions can be seen through characterization, plot, and setting. To begin, the mother’s characterization changed drastically from the film to the book. In the novel, the mother was merely a background character who never failed to agree

This difference was the distance change between the house and the concentration camp in both pieces. In the book it says, “For months now Bruno had been looking out his bedroom window at (...) the tall fence. He had watched the people” (Boyce 99-100). To see things clearly out your window is hard, especially if things are far away. So seeing a fence through a window would be difficult, and seeing people would be close to impossible. With this information it is possible to infer that the camp is close, provided that Bruno is able to see things clearly. In the movie though, the concentration camp is really far away and the people seem to be simply dots moving in the distance. This change can be seen as positive, as it creates a feeling of extreme segregation between the Germans and the Jewish people, but it is still a period in the setting that can be viewed as a difference. These junctures support the fact that the movie strayed far from the novel through the difference in