Machinic Liaisons: Death’s Dance with Children in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief

Abstract

Children and death are deemed opposites in today’s world. Representing life and new beginnings, children appear to be incompatible with death, loss, and even pain. Yet Judith Plotz finds children and death quite compatible insofar as “the high tide of cultural concern with death is contemporary with the emergence of children’s literature as a recognized genre” in the nineteenth century. For Plotz, children’s literature gained its raison d’etre through presencing children as human idolatries, that is, as “a living embodiment of the future, of Nature’s abiding dynamism, and of a possible psychic harmony” to such an extent that “the child is the goal as well as the source of the adult.” Since the loss of such a (symbolic) child in which an adult identity is deeply rooted is unsettling, Plotz claims, “death is characteristically represented in nineteenth-century literature as a presence, not an absence” (3-4, 7).