“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak employs features of the genre Magical Realism to convey his ideas about human existence in his novel. Zusak exposes death in order to make us as readers identify with it, normalising the idea of death to us, by reinforcing the extreme nature of human behaviour through magical realism. The novel exposes death to us through magical realism as he exposes death to be nieve. Death in the novel is personified to convince us to normalize death. Death foreshadows events that will happen throughout the novel from a narrator perspective.

In the novel “The Book Thief” written by Markus Zusak, the author uses ideas such as foreshadowing, personification, characteristics of characters to explore magical realism to convey ideas about human existence in the novel. Published in 2005, the novel opened the lid of our thoughts and faced us with our fears, by questioning our ideas. In particular to the novel, the narrator helped us normalise with death by identifying us, with death throughout the novel. The novel follows a society of people in Nazi Germany that are feared by death, through this glass we can see how human’s are similar in the way they act and think when feeling feared.

. Zusak in the novel exposes death to us by making Death nieve to seem less scary and make us readers become less afraid of death in our own lives. Zusak also personifies death to make the idea of death come alive and give him human characteristics to make death seem more real and more like a person who is with us all the time. Death in the novel from a narrator perspective foreshadows events in the novel to keep us guessing in the novel and it encourages us to keep reading while at the same time makes us realise that death is always there and is like a human that is watching all the time and can see what is going to happen. These are all apart of magical realism and this is what makes this novel portray magical realism while it is also helping Zusak try to change our prior thought of death.

In the novel “The Book Thief” written by Markus Zusak, the author uses ideas such as foreshadowing, personification, characteristics of characters to explore magical realism to convey ideas about human existence in the novel. The novel reinforces the extreme nature of human behaviour through magical realism through many different attributes. This encourages the reader to be contradicted, engaged and eager to read on throughout the novel. Zusak has successfully changed the reader’s idea of death, to be accepting of death and realise that he is just another person like us, that has the power to take our lives when he chooses, just like he did in this novel.