Power_of_Words_-_the_Book_Thief

Words. It is words that Marcus Zusak arms Liesel to create a compelling narrative. Through the respect Liesel shows towards words, she masterfully utilizes words to try and make a difference. Liesel learns throughout the course of the novel that words hold a remarkable power to compel people to commit acts of cruelty and kindness. This can be shown in both episodes, the Hidden Sketchbook and the Gamblers 24th of June. At age 9, Liesel is illiterate, and the first book she learns to read is a manual about grave digging. Learning to read brings Liesel closer to the understanding that Hitler's propaganda is the root of his power and the reason why her mother, father, and brother are dead. Max, who understands the effect Hitler's propaganda has had on his race, helps impart this lesson through his allegorical story "The Word Shaker", where Zusak depicts the power of words for good and for evil. On the 24th of June Liesel adapts her words to, instead, harm an individual. Liesel learns how to hurt with words where she, ‘summons them from some place she only newly recognizes’ in The Gambler chapter during the 24th of June, the Showdown. Until now, Liesel had only found words to be a force to heal, however in this episode we see her summoning the pain and destruction words can cause. Her voice ‘hooked at the woman’s throat’. The metaphor gives supernatural power to Liesel’s words as Zusak uses the mental damage she makes towards Ilsa more tangible to a wider audience, adapting this pain into physical actions. The pain Liesel conflicts on Ilsa shows the reader that spraying words may be just as harmful as a physical hurt. The lines ‘the injury of words, Yes, the brutality of words’ exemplify Zusak’s point of how he highlights the importance of words through the narrator, death. Zusak goes on to write, at the end of Liesel’s onslaught of words, Ilsa becomes ‘Battered and beaten up…blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel’s words.’ Zusak clearly conveys that words can be used just as or even more effectively as physical action. Here, he shows that power through his protagonist, Liesel. The metaphoric use of Liesel’s words engages the reader because Zusak uses simple words to cause physical harm. He evokes the reader to use their imagination and challenges them to think about how much of an affect on a person words can make. Unlike in the Gamblers episode the Hidden sketchbook is a book inside a book, where a cartoon is depicted about a little girl and a man, symbolizing Liesel and Max respectively due to the introduction into the drawings with the quote from max “’The best word shakers were those who understood the true power of words’, Liesel is one such word shaker.” The Allegory conveys the story of a boy, the Fuhrer, who grows trees of control. He grows a forest of propaganda using these negative words to form a ‘nation of farmed thoughts’. In the comic, conveyor belts are depicted with people being run ‘through a machine which gave them a lifetime in a few moments. They were hypnotized’. Zusak refers to the indoctrination of the Nazi regime, in specific attention being made to how the pure influence of words can make so many people relinquish and accept people around them get entranced by the negative words of one man, a boy, the Fuhrer. However the girl and the man juxtapose this negative use of words. The girl grows a tree made with kind, soothing words of friendship and kindness in amidst of the boy’s hypnotic forest. The tree grows and grows to become the mightiest tree there is. Once the girl climbs down the tree falls, crushing a path through the forest, she and the man walk along this path. People do not wish to follow however they watch for ‘they thought they could hear voices and words behind them on the word shaker’s tree.’ This fallen tree symbolizes the antithesis of Liesel to Hitler, it shows how the power of words can change people’s perspective and through this, can change humanity. Marcus Zusak uses the allegory of the word shaker to show how words can be used for positive and negative outcomes. Here is the young boy who uses the power of words to spellbound listeners and to follow out his commands. And here is the little girl fighting against him with friendship and kindness. Zusak differentiates this episode with the Gamblers episode and shows how just one person can have such an affect with words in both a positive and negative aspect to a wider group of people. Instead of showing how words can hurt the individual, Zusak demonstrates how words can indoctrinate a whole nation of individuals. It is clearly outlined in these drawings by Max that the words which rejuvenate can make much more of an impact on people, as when Liesel’s tree falls and creates a huge impact on the watchers. They notice the path that it creates. They notice that there is a way to freedom. Words. It is the words and how Zusak represents words in The Book Thief, which compels readers. Words are the tools Liesel uses to change her world of Mulching in Nazi Germany. Zusak shows that if a young girl uses Words to such a powerful effect, he asks us a question. What effect can we make with words to change our world'