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‘Compare how far and in what ways death is presented as harder for those left behind’.
Death is often presented as a bringer of horror and destruction; it is a grave reminder of the loss of a loved one, and how the living continue to live on without their presence. Indeed, grief is carried in many ways and from many circumstances, as of which will be seen in the texts I will be discussing. Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, both show us the implications of death and the horror of society, but also the individual experience and personal change that occurs after such a death. The Book Thief implies struggle and mystery, whilst Birthday Letters emulates tragic and nostalgic happiness. Most certainly, ‘those left behind’ face the brunt of grief, but is it always harder for everyone?
Firstly, the theme of guilt must be discussed. In The Book Thief, guilt is displayed universally, and is seen through all of the characters. The shared emotion connects these different people, despite their various and individual experiences, and we as the reader are connected to a world bound to collective mourning and suffering. This is contrasted slightly in Birthday Letters, where Hughes’ own choices are reflective and personal. In the reading of one of Hughes poems, Red, empathy can be found with Hughes in his struggle to comprehend the complexities of Plath’s internal suffering, which could be seen as being experienced by every reader of the anthology. However, it could also be argued that the emotional response after his wife’s [Sylvia Plath] death, was shared by reader and family alike, alerting to the impact of a loved member of one’s community, regardless of the circumstances. When Birthday Letters was published, Hughes described them as ‘so raw, so vulnerable, so unprocessed, so naive, so self-exposing & unguarded…’. In a sense, Birthday Letters represents the embodiment of grief in Hughes; it is his own personal memoir to Plath and the memory of her. This representation of one character impacting others is represented through The Book Thief’s protagonist Liesel Meminger, whose guilt is shown immediately: her brother’s death at the beginning of the novel. This death greatly affects her throughout the novel, and signifies the importance and how fleeting mortality is. Guilt is also shown through Liesel’s own thoughts: she imagines herself as a burden to the Hubermann family, and she is berated, ‘You filthy pig…” alluding to the family’s dislike of her. The negative influence death has on humans is probably because life is the only form of existence we experience, and ending of this life is associated with pain, loss and the ambiguity of afterlife. This aura of dislike due to terrible circumstances links to Hughes and his poetry in many ways. For one, the media outrage surrounding him after Plath’s suicide links to him receiving the majority of the blame due to his extramarital affair, and the reflection of these guilt-ridden feelings are, for one example, represented in the poem The Minotaur, where Hughes delves into the darker sides of Plath, ‘mapped with the scars of his whole life’ is symbolic of his life, person, and the mistakes and pains. She destroys a chair for him being late to care for the children. This could imply that the cause of her anger was his detachment from his children, maybe a detail to emphasise the insanity and reasonless of her rages. These emotions reflect similarly in The Book Thief, with the foster family adopting Liesel and as mentioned, their initial dislike towards her due to her being different and detached from the rest of the Hubermann family. Ultimately, after death, those left behind – in terms of guilt – will often feel responsible.
However, whilst these shared experiences of grief can indeed make it hard for those left behind, the individual experience of death can often determine how a story is presented. The Book Thief represents this point uniquely through Liesel’s journey as she progresses as a character. Much like how Zusak’s mother would tell him of what she saw in Nazi Germany, we see the horrors of human nature as she does. This individual sense of how death can affect one’s nature and mind, can entirely depend on what he or she sees, and therefore cannot always surround everyone. This is also heavily present in Birthday Letters; whilst Plath’s death was felt universally, the specific guilt surrounding her suicide could only be felt and appointed to Hughes himself, and no other. Liesel collectively shares this feeling; once Death has slipped into her experience, she is unable to ignore Him, and cannot ignore the feelings of guilt that He brings; Liesel is first introduced feeling guilty about her brother, and continues to feel this throughout the novel. However, these realisations do not occur to her until after her brother’s death, which represents Liesel as a character inexperienced with the concept of loss, and also suggesting that the knowledge of loss does not actually touch her until this moment, and thus further symbolises how death cannot be as hard for a collection of people, as is it for one person. Furthermore, in The Book Thief, Death is a character himself, personified as a human and acting as the narrator; in Birthday Letters this view is taken by Hughes, and while tragic and personal, the poems do not entirely reflect a complete and individual understanding of one’s life, and this is also justified by the anthology’s main purpose: for Hughes to argue against the accusation that he was the cause of Plath’s suicide. The three poems The Minotaur, Your Paris, and Red are a further insight into this view; however they seem to not all use fierce language as a justification. All poems seem to equally describe the death of Plath using an incredibly emotive poetic form, expressing a melancholic and reminiscent viewpoint. This contrast is mirrored in The Book Thief as well; as the setting is Nazi Germany we expect a violent and chaotic situation through a viewpoint of perhaps a soldier, but instead we receive a story from the eyes of an unexpected character, whose innocence and isolation gives a completely different perspective is what could be predicted. In the case of Birthday Letters, this viewpoint is given from Hughes’ personal justification; he uses many techniques to establish his own suffering, such as metaphors, connotations of death, and juxtaposition to encourage the audience to accept his argument that he was not the one to blame for the tragedy, and The Book Thief (despite its non-linear form) similarly uses these to represent the horror and tragedy of what death can do to an individual. Death is possibly presented here as – of course – being hard for both Liesel and Hughes respectively; ultimately an individual can affected greatly by one’s passing, and in some instances can be desperate to rid of that pain.
In contrast, the feeling of isolation can be collectively shared after someone’s passing. A major instance of this in The Book Thief is with the character of Hans Hubermann. Hans, Liesel’s foster father, is isolated from the majority of the German society because of his beliefs. He disagrees with the Nazi’s principles – and by extension the general social order. This belief causes him to be jobless and lose the people close to him [his son]. In this instance, isolation is not physical, like with Liesel or Max, but psychological. He is not separated from society in a material way, but instead mentally, through his beliefs. This represents the main frame of isolation within The Book Thief, in which each character is faced with an individual experience exclusive only to them. This framework is also present in the narrative of Hughes’ The Minotaur; the darker side of Plath -and hence the corresponding feelings of grief and despair – was only available to him Similarly, all three of these characters face struggles with isolation, and it impacts them severely: all three of them attempt to flee from it, often with failure. When faced with these moments of isolation, Max, Liesel, and Hans attempt to escape it, in order to gain peace from horror and grief that was consuming the world. In Liesel’s case, one of these attempts was to start stealing books. Liesel stole books as a comfort, reading for her was She stole and read these books to escape her isolation and enter different worlds. Birthday Letters is a perfect example of Hughes entering a different reality, also, one where the blame is not on himself, but on others. These desperate moments represent how isolation, particularly from death, can make a collective impact on more than one person. Furthermore, the character of Death Himself cannot stand to look at the heartbroken survivors in the story. Ilsa Hermann, [Liesel’s foster mother] is a main representation of one of Death’s “heartbroken survivors”. She becomes a quiet and sullen woman after her only son is killed in 1918, yet Liesel brings her happiness, indicating that while death can traumatise a person for the rest of their life, it can also bring fleeting moments of remembrance and joy. Indeed, the price of living is guilt and shame, and both Liesel and Hughes suffer a similar fate. Death describes Liesel as the perpetual survivor, demonstrating a sense of isolation which is unique only to her. In Birthday Letters the brief moment of being a survivor could be argued to be Hughes’ poems themselves; they could be considered a memoir of sorts for him to remember her by. All of these experiences represent death as bringing nothing but horror and grief, but in some cases – such as Ilsa’s – bring unexpected moments of happiness through sheer coincidence.
In Birthday Letters this isolation is rather attributed to the abandonment of his happiness, despite how guilt has affected him. For example, the quote ‘You were undeflected. You were gold-jacketed, solid silver, Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect, as through ether’ from The Shot denotes how his love for Plath was great, using precious metals to describe her, and a strange semantic field that could resemble a bullet, ‘trajectory’ and ‘jacketed’. This not only describes Plath as ambitious, but also seemingly headstrong and it becomes clear that he thinks Plath’s ambitions were a factor behind the failure of their marriage, and by extension, the cause of his grief and despair. These constant acts of blame on Plath and not himself truly represent his isolation: now that she is gone, he refuses to blame himself, and thus his grief lashes out on others; this links to the Hubermann’s initial dislike of Liesel due to the horrors of what they have already experienced. In essence, what others have experienced beforehand – that have caused isolation and suffering – can ultimately result in mistrust for those left behind. As the series of poems moves towards Plath’s death, Hughes becomes more obsessed with the differences between himself and her, possibly representing Hughes’ methods to escape blame and distrust, but also personifying his extreme loneliness and the following attempts to escape from it. He is particularly motivated by her father, who is a shadowy presence hanging in the background, and seems to always be a source of overlying grief and misunderstanding. In her poem Daddy, Plath confronts her feelings towards her father, who was a German immigrant who died when she was a child. Immediately, this haunting and personal layer of discomfort and grief links with Liesel’s initial entrance in the story: her being placed in a foster family due to the war. In a series of short statements, Hughes attempts to place his opinion on her father, and seems desperate for her to not be like him, ‘you did not / Want to be Christ like’. The direct address contributes to a sense that Hughes is creating his own Plath: his opinion of her. In many ways, Hughes’ obsession with Otto Plath [Plath’s father] is his explanation of everything that went wrong in the relationship and caused Plath’s suicide. He is the only figure to appear in the final poem, ‘Red’, as Plath’s fixation with the colour red is blamed on ‘Salvias, that your father named you after’. This one event in Plath’s childhood caused the red-fixation which, Hughes suggests in the poem, caused her suicide. Red can be seen as a signifier for blood, anger, and death the poem, with Plath’s red ‘throbbing cell’ being a place where no good can happen. Blood is also subconsciously present in The Book Thief, functioning as a source of grief and despair; Death describes that ‘the last time I saw her [Liesel] was red’ , emphasising that even after long periods of suffering and despair, death can still impact a life forever. Similarly, for Birthday Letters the message is clear: Hughes has been haunted by Plath for thirty years, and the isolation that has followed her death is like a ghost, surrounding and consuming him. In the poems, he seems to have accepted this grief, however, and tried to capture things as they were, hoping perhaps to move on. Overall, Grief and isolation are shown to be severely damaging here.
In conclusion, ultimately, death is harder for not just the individual left behind, but in fact can have a universal effect, such as Plath’s wave of sympathy gathered from the world at the news of her death. For The Book Thief, loss and grief are represented as the main feelings of ‘those left behind’ and are seen by Liesel as a coping mechanism at the end of the novel. Although, the aftereffects of loss are also shown to sometimes generate positivity, such as Liesel bringing happiness to the Hubermann family after their loss, and Hughes’ ability to write collections such as Birthday Letters as a way to remember Plath.
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