“I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it’cold. I don’t have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy to pinning on me from a distance.”

From this quote, death is trying to change our perception or the views we currently have of him. I personally thought of him as a ghostly-like figure that actually wore the dark hooded robe and carried a sickle or a scythe. But after reading this quite it changed my view of him to quite possibly he could just be a normal human being. I think Makus Zusak did this as it normalizes death in the story. Death isn’t a out of the ordinary creature, but just a normal person so using this we can see that death in the time of the war is just a ordinary. There is no significance about it.

Makus Zusak uses personification and through first person narrative to normalize death in the book thief. He uses personification by eliminating the thing that we as human would associate as a death character, the “skull-like facial features” and the myth that he would “carry around a sickle or a scythe”. Death describes his job of collecting soles through first person narrative in the way a normal person would describe their 9-5 job. The intention of these 2 things is it makes the reader change the perception we have of death and think of him as a normal person. This therefore enhances the ideas that death presents to us as it gives the reader a greater connection with death and there for the views he presents through his first person narrative is more trusted by the reader.