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Night Vs. The Book Thief

Decent Essays

Night vs The Book Thief
Both set in the time period of World War II, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Elie Wiesel’s Night tell a story revolving around the events of the Holocaust. However, each book tells a very different story and uses different word choices to describe their story. The diction used in the young-adult fiction novel The Book Thief and the nonfiction memoir Night drew a sharp contrast when compared to each other, highlighting the intentions of each book.
Night, a mostly non fiction story, told the tale of Elie Wiesel’s hardship ridden journey through the concentration camps. When Wiesel described his experiences in his memoir Night, his diction included grotesque and gory descriptions. An example of this would be when Wiesel …show more content…

Wiesel’s intention in writing Night was to educate as many people as possible about the horrors those who went through the concentration camps faced, educate them so that the Holocaust would not be forgotten and so that nothing of the kind would happen again. Wiesel used grotesque descriptions and powerful imagery such as his most shocking observation when he reaches the concentration camps. “Babies! Yes I did see this, with my very own eyes… children thrown into the flames” (Wiesel 32). These vivid, emotionally charged language reflected the horrid conditions in the concentration camps, accomplishing Wiesel’s purpose. Zusak’s intention in writing The Book Thief was to entertain and the diction used was very much shaped by the fact that the book was marketed as a book for young adults, developing minds. Zusak’s language was less grotesque and the events in The Book Thief were much less intense when compared to Night. This had the effect of sugarcoating over some of the awful events that were happening at the time period, awful events that perhaps Zusak didn’t think some of his readers could handle. An example would be how Zusak wrote about the death of Liesel Meminger’s brother, he wrote it in the perspective of death stating “I knelt down and extracted his soul” (Zusak 21). This portrayal of her brother’s death as Death taking his soul is a rather child-friendly way to sugarcoat the

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