I decided to analyze the last chapter of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, titled The Handover Man (I was hesitant to do so, as writing about the last chapter seemed uninspired and lazy, but this one affected me too much to pass it up). The chapter begins with Death, the narrator, stating that although he has seen some of the greatest and most debilitating events in human history, there are other memories, more personal. He details Liesel’s soul removal, traveling to Sydney where she lived, and makes an unexpected decision. After holding on to Liesel’s book for decades, he returns it to its rightful owner, taking her for a stroll along the street. She is awed; her basement writings had been saved, though faded and broken. She asks Death if he’d…show more content… There were definite undertones of sadness and remembrance of things that were as heavy as Liesel’s words. A fragility was imbued through the old woman Liesel had become, and how Death describes lightly setting her soul to the pavement to walk with him. I felt a sense of frustration at the end; Death is trying to entail what he understands of Liesel’s book and the whole of humanity, but struggles to find the right words. Often I feel like this, as if I could better a statement with a bit more articulation and thought. “I am haunted by humans,” Death says. The book weighed more than it used to, and I saw that through this story of a little girl in Nazi Germany, I had been given a multitude of quotes that were extremely open to interpretation and dipped into some of life’s questions. Death, obviously, had seen the entire human race progress until the present—wouldn’t you want to join in? Wouldn’t you want to contribute to society and innovate and socialize and hate and love? It would be torture to watch such a fascinating species and never be a part of it, other than taking members of the species from the place you so wished to belong to. I would be