Non-linear Narrative Structure in The Book Thief

Again, if you missed the beginning of this series, start here to catch up.

Okay, so we’ve finished up our discussion of Zusak’s use of first person omniscience. Now we’re going to take a look at the way he uses non-linear narrative structure in The Book Thief. To start off with, non-linear structure is simply when you tell a story in a non-chronological fashion. A few examples of this are The Odyssey, Wuthering Heights, Catch 22, and most of William Faulkner’s works.  Common ways to use this form is to start the story in media res, or in the midst of the action, or using flashbacks or flash forwards, or the backwards story- starting the story at the end (Sanderson, Non-linear).

Zusak uses many of these in The Book Thief. He makes frequent use of flashbacks, most often in telling backstory for various characters, and flashes forward in the second chapter of the book to show us two of the times he saw Liesel in the flesh.

So why do this? Why would you want to go to all the work to figure out how to put the story together this way instead of just telling it chronologically? Non-linear structure is hard to do well, and can be risky. You risk confusing your readers as you jump around in time, and it can also frustrate your readers if it’s overly complicated or they don’t see the point of why you’re doing it. Why use non-linear structure?

One thing it can do is make a story, especially backstory, more interesting. Max’s story before coming to the Hubermanns’ would not have been as intriguing if he had simply told it to Liesel (and the reader). “Well, my father died when I was a child and I lived with my mother, uncle, aunt, and cousins. I fought a lot, and one day I had to leave them.” Okay, so it wouldn’t be quite that concise or boring, but by using a flashback, Zusak was able to show us Max’s life and insights into who Max is, insights that Max wouldn’t have told Liesel.

Along these same lines, it helps an author avoid the dreaded info dump. We’ve all seen this. An author, knowing that certain information needs to be given, spends pages just dumping it into our laps. It’s not fun to read. Zusak avoids this many times by simply jumping the reader to another time/place and showing us the story as it unfolds.It’s much better to show than tell, as creative writing teachers love to say, and using a non-linear structure allows the writer to do this.

It also allows the writer to increase the suspense/tension. By showing us at the beginning that Liesel was going to end up in a bombed out street, Zusak hooks from the beginning into wanting to know how on earth she ends up there. Janet Burroway says in  Writing Fiction A Guide to Narrative Craft

“The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of the a higher order. Once we have the facts, we inevitably look for the links between them, and only when we find such links are we satisfied that we “understand.” Rote memorization in a science bores almost everyone. Grasp and a sense of discovery begin only when we perceive why “a body in motion tends to remain in motion” and what an immense effect this actuality has on the phenomena of our lives.

“The same is true of the events of a story. Random incidents neither move nor illuminate; we want to know why one things leads to another and to feel the inevitability of cause and effect.” (40)

This desire is what Zusak taps into when he uses non-linear structure. This desire to know what happens takes us through the novel. And Zusak reminds us often of the bomb horrors to come through Death’s dropping of hints. Dan Wells, a horror writer,  points out,

One of the tenets of writing suspense— it’s actually an Alfred Hitchcock quote which I’m paraphrasing. He said when a bomb is under a table, and it goes off, that’s action.When it’s under a table and doesn’t go off, that’s suspense. You can use flashbacks in this way to build that. By showing us that there’s a bomb under the table and even perhaps showing that it is going off, but then jumping back in time and letting us worry about it for a long time. (Sanderson, Non-linear)

Zusak uses this same idea with some of his flash forwards, like here.

On many counts, taking a boy like Rudy was robbery—so much life, so much to live for—yet somehow, I’m certain he would have loved to see the frightening rubble and the swelling of the sky on the night he passed away. He’d have cried and turned and smiled if only he could have seen the book thief on her hands and knees, next to his decimated body. He’d have been glad to witness her kissing his dusty, bomb-hit lips. (Zusak 242)

He sets off a bomb of sorts (Rudy’s death) and then ignores it for a long time, leaving the reader to stew about the fact that Rudy is going to die. It’s highly effective, but it doesn’t leave us so worried that we throw the book across the room in disgust because the author won’t just tell us what we want to know! Instead, Zusak uses it as a form of foreshadowing, giving us just enough to keep us interested, but not enough that we’re going  crazy.

So how can you keep your readers from getting lost as you’re jumping around in time? First, it helps if you stick with one time or character for a while. Don’t jump every two paragraphs, or even every couple of pages. Stick with it for a chapter or so, telling a complete story arc, or as close to one as you can. Zusak does this when he jumps to tell us Max’s story or Han’s experience in WWI or with the LSE. We stay with them for several pages each. This makes it easier to settle into the change or time/place, and then once that bit of story is done, we’re ready to move on to the next person.

Another trick is to use chapter headings to label when you’re switching. If you don’t want to do that, then use concrete details and character traits to let us know when/where/who we’ve switched to. Don’t leave the reader lost and confused. Let them know what’s going on immediately. Otherwise, they’ll quit reading and we definitely don’t want that.

Non-linear structure is difficult to do, but can be incredibly rewarding for the writer and reader. Give it a go!

This concludes my series on The Book Thief. I hope that you enjoyed this experiment. I enjoyed it, and hope you did as well!

Writing Prompt

Write a story where three people are trapped in a room. Use flashbacks to tell how they ended up there, and then finish the story. I leave it up to you whether they escape the room or not.

First Person Omniscience in The Book Thief, Part Two

This is the second of two posts on the first person omniscient viewpoint in The Book Thief. (If you missed the first post in this series on The Book Thief, you can find the introduction here.)

Another pro of the first person omniscient viewpoint is it removes us slightly from Liesel’s pain and emotions, which could become overwhelming without the distance given us by Death. Imagine the scene at the end where she is howling in the street where everyone she knows has been killed by Allied bombs. Had Liesel been telling the story in a first person viewpoint, this scene would have been almost too much to bear to read.

Now please don’t judge, but I thought the best way to show what I mean by the two differing viewpoints was to show you part of the scene and then rewrite it from Liesel’s viewpoint. I don’t know how successful I was in my rewrite, but I think it gets close to the general idea. Here’s part of the original scene, as Zusak wrote it with the narrator being Death:

She did more than mouth the word now. “Rudy?”

He lay with yellow hair and closed eyes, and the book thief ran toward him and fell down. She dropped the black book. “Rudy,” she sobbed, “wake up ….” She grabbed him by his shirt and gave him just the slightest disbelieving shake. “Wake up, Rudy,” and now, as the sky went on heating and showering ash, Liesel was holding Rudy Steiner’s shirt by the front. “Rudy, please.” The tears grappled with her face. “Rudy, please, wake up, Goddamn it, wake up, I love you. Come on, Rudy, come on, Jesse Owens, don’t you know I love you, wake up, wake up, wake up ….”

But nothing cared.

The rubble just climbed higher. Concrete hills with caps of red. A beautiful, tear-stomped girl, shaking the dead. “

Come on, Jesse Owens—”

But the boy did not wake (Zusak 535).

Now here’s my rewrite, with Liesel as the narrator.

The word slipped out before I even knew what I was saying. “Rudy?”

He lay with yellow hair and closed eyes. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, not Rudy. Please, God, not Rudy. I ran toward him and fell down, my limbs unable to support me a second longer as my world shattered into a million pieces. My book fell from my hand. “Rudy,” I cried, tears streaming down my face in rivers I knew would never end. “wake up…” I grabbed his shirt and shook him, unable to believe he wasn’t just pulling a joke on me. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t. Rudy, oh God, Rudy. Why? Why? Why? “Wake up, Rudy.” I held my best friend by the front of his shirt, willing him with all the power I had to wake up, to hear what I was saying.  “Rudy, please.” Anyone, any god, please. Wake him up. The tears continued to flow, though I barely noticed them now. “Rudy, please, wake up, Goddamn it, wake up, I love you.” Why hadn’t I realized that before now? Why could I only realize that when it was everlastingly too late. “Come on, Rudy, come on, Jesse Owens, don’t you know I love you, wake up, wake up, wake up…”

I was shaking him now. I’m not sure to this day if the words came out as a whisper or a scream.

“Come on, Jesse Owens—”

But Rudy wouldn’t wake up. My mind couldn’t accept the reality in front of me. Rudy would never wake up.

After writing the scene from Liesel’s point of view, I think that I may not have been entirely correct in saying that first person omniscience gives the reader some distance to keep the scene from being overwhelming. It does give us distance, but that distance gives the scene a kind of emotional power that being in Liesel’s head doesn’t. In my version of the scene, it’s very immediate, and we can feel her anguish (at least I hope you can). But in the original, we not only feel her pain, but we feel the real horror of the scene as a whole and it’s placed in the context of the world as a whole. Death can describe the scene around Liesel and say things like “But nothing cared” (Zusak 535). Liesel, because she is so wrapped up in the pain and horror of finding out her best friend is dead, can’t notice the setting and describe it. Her viewpoint is very focused on her own pain and Rudy’s body. Death is a step back, and yet in Liesel’s emotions at the same time.

Now for the downsides. Some cons to using this particular viewpoint is its unusualness. There are only a very few books use this viewpoint successfully. This is partially because to use this viewpoint in your own writing, you must have a narrator who can be omniscient. Death as a character can be omniscient. In The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, the narrator can be omniscient because she is dead. Beyond those two options, who can be omniscient? In thinking about this, the only options I could come up with was a god or goddess, a psychic, or maybe an alien of some sort. If your story doesn’t have any of those characters, you can’t really use this.

Another con is the omniscient narrator knows everything, and since we’re in first person, the narrator can’t really hide things from the reader. This means that Death is constantly giving away plot points, which, depending on what kind of reader you are, can be nice or can annoy the heck out of you. For example, near the middle of The Book Thief, Death drops a bomb on the reader.

A SMALL ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT RUDY STEINER

He didn’t deserve to die the way he did (Zusak 241).

The protagonist’s best friend is going to die. That’s kind of a big plot point to be giving away halfway through the novel. And not only that, but he’s going to die by bomb. Death essentially gave away the end of the book. He then draws attention to the fact that he just did it, declaring

Of course, I’m being rude. I’m spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don’t have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me (Zusak 243)

For me, this worked well, because it gave me time as a reader to adjust to the idea. It would have been a little too much to have no warning at all that Liesel’s neighborhood was going to be bombed. I probably would have thrown the book across the room, to be perfectly honest. But because of the first person omniscient viewpoint, Death knew what was going to happen, and could give the reader a heads up about it, making a little easier to deal with.

But only a little easier.

If this interests you, give it a whirl! Try it and see if it works for your story or not.In the next post, (I’m shooting for Thursday)  we’ll talk about non-linear structure in The Book Thief.

Writing Prompt

Find a scene written in the first person and rewrite it so it’s being told from a first person omniscient narrator. The new narrator should not be the original narrator. Alternately, take a third person limited scene and rewrite it using a first person omniscient narrator.

First Person Omniscience in The Book Thief, Part One

If you missed the previous posts, you can find the introduction post here. Because there is a lot to cover with this topic, I’ve split it into two posts.

Before we dive into this too much, a few definitions, just so everyone’s clear.

• Viewpoint is whose head we’re in or who’s telling the story.
• Third person omniscience is “where the narrator can see all the action and know the thoughts of the characters who are performing the action, and isn’t restricted to a particular character’s point of view” (Sanderson, “Writing the Omniscient Viewpoint”).
• First person is the narrator is the “I” in the story and is restricted to whatever is in his/her/it’s own head.

Why do I give these definitions? Because as the title of the post suggests, Mark Zusak in The Book Thief uses a rare combination of viewpoints: first person omniscience. My definition for this is: a narrator who is the “I” and can tell you their own thoughts/viewpoint, but also has access to the thoughts, actions, motivations, etc of all the other characters. An example of this from the book:

Liesel had no idea where she was. All was white, and as they remained at the station, she could only stare at the faded lettering of the sign in front of her. For Liesel, the town was nameless, and it was there that her brother, Werner, was buried two days later….

Mistakes, mistakes, it’s all I seem capable of at times.

For two days, I went about my business. I traveled the globe as always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity  (Zusak 22-23).

As you can see, we start this section in a third person viewpoint. We know Liesel’s thoughts and what’s going on in her head, yet are somewhat distanced from her. To me, this is one of the signs of an omniscient narrator. But just a few paragraphs later, we are back in Death’s head, hearing the story from the position of the I. This switching from third person to first person goes on throughout the book. Death, in telling us the complete story, hops from head to head among the characters and gives us pieces of his own story during WWII and his commentary on what’s going on.

So why would a writer want to use this structure? Why does Zusak choose to use this odd viewpoint? I think the answer largely lies in the huge pro of first person omniscience: it gives the story the intimacy of a first person narrator while still giving the author access to other characters’ brains. This intimacy and access is something Zusak takes advantage of time and time again. Imagine The Book Thief if Liesel had been the sole narrator. The story wouldn’t have worked, because it is so dependant on knowing Max’s story, Han’s story, and other characters’ thoughts and stories that Liesel wasn’t around to see.

It also allowed Zusak to give a unique perspective to the WWII story. WWII is an event a lot of YA writers have written about. By giving Death the story, Zusak gives a different perspective than the normal “teen trying to deal with the effects of Nazi occupation”. Instead, we can see what Death thinks of all this, and it isn’t what you’d think. His commentary on what is going on in the story is powerful and gives insights that a human first person narrator or a third person omniscient narrator couldn’t. For example, in the chapter titled “Death’s diary, 1942” Death pulls us out of Liesel’s story to give us a taste of what he was dealing with. He gives us what he calls

AN ABRIDGED ROLL CALL FOR 1942

1. The desperate Jews—their spirits in my lap as we sat on the roof, next to the steaming chimneys.

2. The Russian soldiers—taking only small amounts of ammunition, relying on the fallen for the rest of it.

3. The soaked bodies of a French coast—beached on the shingle and sand.

I could go on, but I’ve decided for now that three examples will suffice. Three examples, if nothing else, will give you the ashen taste in your mouth that defined my existence during that year (Zusak 308).

This chapter is one of the most powerful moments in the book for me. Most fiction WWII books focus in on the effects of a war on a single person, family, or village. By using Death as a narrator, Zusak is able to do that and at the same time give us the widescreen shot that Death sees. A little later in the same chapter, Death pulls us back from the wide shot and gives his own view on what WWII felt like for him.

They say that war is death’s best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thing, incessantly: “Get it done, get it done.” So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more (Zusak 309).

Death then pulls us back from the horrors of war to Liesel, taking snow to Max in the basement. He uses this switching back and forth between his own story and hers to balance the tension and the horror of the subject repeatedly. This sort of back and forth isn’t available to the normal first person narrator. It is available to the third person omniscient narrator, but without the intimacy and connection that comes with a first person narrator.

In the next post, which should be up Saturday, we’ll continue talking about first person omniscience. Since we’re trying to learn from The Book Thief to improve our own writing, I want to give everyone (myself included) a writing prompt to try this out.

Writing Prompt

Write a scene using the third person viewpoint. Then add a first person narrator who is not involved directly in the scene commenting on what’s happening. Don’t change anything about the third person viewpoint;  just add the first person narrator.

Exploring Narrative Structure through “The Book Thief”

Okay, remember when I talked about the experiment coming up? Here’s the first post! This will be a series of  posts taking an in-depth look at Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I will be looking at a number of writing techniques, mostly connected with narrative structure and narrator, and picking apart how he does it, why he does it, why we would or would not want to do it, and how we can use the techniques he uses in our own writing. Sound good? Off we go then!

Before we dive into that, a couple of items of business. There will be spoilers. Read The Book Thief before reading these posts. It’s an excellent book and well worth the time. It’s one of the most powerful books I’ve read in the past year. Liesel and the people who inhabit her world will haunt your mind for days after you’ve finished the book. The themes of life and death, the power of words, love, and growing up are beautifully treated in a way I’ve never seen before. Here’s a quick teaser synopsis of the book:

Death tells the tale of a girl, Liesel, orphaned when her Communist father is taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel goes to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann in a small town outside Munich. Hans teaches Liesel to read, and thereafter she steals and reads every book she can get her hands on. The Hubermanns also take in Max, a young Jewish man, and the relationship between Liesel and Max forms the emotional and thematic core of the novel (Ridge).

Second, if you’re interested in any of the sources I’ll be quoting, click on the citations and you’ll go to a works cited page where you can find out how to find the sources I used. If they’re on-line sources, I’ll link you to the page via the works cited page.

Like I said, it’s an incredibly powerful novel. I would call it one of, if not the best novel dealing with World War II that I’ve ever read. And it has one of the most fascinating narrators/narrative structures (first person omniscient narrator and non-linear structure) that I’ve ever seen. It’s complicated, moving around from person to person, place to place, and even jumping around in time, yet the story flows in an incredibly natural way. This is something I tend to struggle with in my own writing and I’m not doing anything anywhere near as complicated as Zusak!

I feel like The Book Thief is a book I (and others) could learn a lot from. I’m focusing on narrative structure, but there is also a lot that can be learned about characterization, themes, etc. But since the narrative structure is so unusual, I chose to focus on that. Naturally, I want to figure out how he did what he did so I can steal it and use it in my own writing and present my findings to you so you can use it yours!

Next post we’ll discuss Zusak’s use of first person omniscience in The Book Thief. Again, if you haven’t read the book, do so! And feel free to start a discussion of what I’ve written in the comments. Keep it respectful and clean, but please share your opinion. That way we can all learn from each other and help each other become better writers. The next post should be up Wednesday. Watch for it!

Stepping it up

I’ve been doing this blogging thing for about two, nearly three months now. And I think I’ve done a decent job for someone who really has no clue what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure I’ve kept my promise to write a post a week. But it’s time to step it up.

So here’s what I’m going to try for. There will still be randomness (that is inherently required in a blog with random in the title) but I want to be a little more organized. So, what I’m going to try for is one writing-type post a week, and one “whatever I feel like posting about” post a week. That’s right, I’m moving up to twice a week now.

This will definitely take more planning and preparation on my part. But that’s okay. I really do want this blog to become something, and the only way it’s going to do that is if I put in the work. So bear with me as I try this out, leave comments to let me know what you like and what you don’t, and we’ll see how this goes.