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Prologue: Beside the Railway Line
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Book Thief, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Death
Words and Language
Books
Stealing and Giving
Color, Beauty, and Ugliness
Summary
Analysis
Death associates the next scene with the color black. It is night, and there is a crashed plane with a pilot inside. A boy appears with a tool box, followed by the book thief. The boy pulls out a teddy bear and places it next to the pilot's body. Death takes the pilot's soul and then a crowd starts to gather around the smoking plane. A shadow seems to pass over like an eclipse. Death explains that this sometimes happens when a human dies, and that he has seen millions of eclipses.
More foreshadowing, but no explanation of who the characters are or how the story arrived at such a strange scene. The reader then has this to look forward to, and another moment around which Death will structure the story. Everything feels inevitable, like death itself.
Themes
