ESSAY STRUCTURE - LEVEL 3: SAMPLE PARAGRAPH

GLOBAL STATEMENT Novels, although fictional, can reflect truthful and accurate ideas about moments in history. They can transport the reader
to contexts that are outside of their own experience.

In The Book Thief, the line between fiction and reality becomes blurred through Zusak’s creative, yet insightful portrayal of
THESIS a very real, devastating time in human history: the Holocaust. Zusak makes extensive use of figurative language in his
depiction of setting, in order to present essential truths about the suffering of the Jews within the context of Nazi Germany.

When describing the ‘Road of Yellow Stars,’ a ghetto that was home to many impoverished Jews, Zusak creates vivid
INTRODUCE QUOTE imagery of their suffering.

He describes how the Jewish shops were, “still labeled with yellow stars and anti-Jewish slurs … it was a place
EVIDENCE / QUOTE nobody wanted to look at … shaped like a long broken arm, the road contained several houses with lacerated
windows and bruised walls.”

Zusak’s creative use of simile to compare the road to ‘a long broken arm’ and his personification of the ‘lacerated windows
ANALYSIS and bruised walls’ symbolises the collective identity of the Jews; they were tormented and wounded by Nazi persecution,
not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. The language used reflects the real pain and suffering inflicted on
them during this context due to Hitler’s ethnocentrism.

INTRODUCE 2nd QUOTE Zusak’s use of figurative language and medical discourse continues to reflect the attitudes prevalent in this context.

EVIDENCE / 2ND QUOTE The simile, “those houses were almost like lepers” and the metaphor equating them to "infected sores on the
injured German terrain,”

… reflect the anti-Semitic attitudes espoused by Hitler that poisoned the minds of the people against them. The use of
medical discourse and, in particular, the references to sickness and disease, mirrors how many Germans were indoctrinated
ANALYSIS to feel repulsed by the Jews, seeing them as a plague on Germany, something dirty and unclean that needed to be
eradicated. The term ‘leper’ emphasises the social ostracism of the Jewish people, who were treated with disdain, as if they
were somehow infectious and needed to be avoided.

These essential truths about this period in history have been conveyed creatively and figuratively through Zusak’s
READER RESPONSE manipulation of language, evoking in modern readers a sense of sorrow and grief for the Jewish population at that time
who suffered unfathomable cruelty.