"I am an achievement," says Markus Zusak's Death in his novel The Book Thief (Zusak 8). This state of being of the character commonly seen as harmful and destructive provides good insight into the unique image of Death presented in the novel. Far from the common perception of Death with the armed scythe and the black hooded robe he wears, Death here is amiable, affable and pleasant (1). He poses before readers who want to find out what he really looks like to "find [themselves] a mirror" as he continues to narrate the story. The being here is much more like a beleaguered old man with a deep exhaustible supply of dry, macabre humor. He does not rejoice in the death of humanity, much less the cause. He is the result of our death. Someone (not just something) to clean up the mess we leave behind. And after millennia of observing the best and worst of humans, Death has developed a special love for them. Death feels as much as any human being, imagines, gets bored, gets distracted and above all wonders (350, 243, 1, 375 respectively). . Strange, one might say for an eternal metaphysical being. But then again, not that strange once you consider how Death spends his time. It is there at the moment of the death of all light, at the moment the soul leaves its physical shell and sees the beauty or horror of that moment. Where for a human being to witness a death firsthand (even on a much more detached level than our narrator) can easily be a life-changing event, Death is forced to witness these passages for nearly every moment of his life eternal. Emotional overload or philosophical catalyst? Death gains his unique perspective on life through his many experiences with slowly closing eyelids and murmured last words. Yet in this... middle of the paper... are his footsteps approaching? The novel revolves around the premise of Death's contemplation of humanity's value and his inability to reconcile the extraordinary cruelty and compassion of which humans are simultaneously capable. This fact, this paradoxical and wonderful scenario, always follows him. The Death the reader befriends in The Book Thief is far from the Death he previously feared to see looming over him in the twilight hours of life. We are haunted by him and he by us. As a group, we form opposite ends of a spectrum: a species with the infinite capacity to love and hate, create and destroy, burn and build, and the eternal metaphysical being who must witness the entire process, without ever truly being in able to understand what it means to live, but always love those who do it. Works Cited Zusak, Markus. The book thief. 2005. New York: Knopf Publishing. Press.