Narrative Voice In John Boyne's The Boy In The Striped P

In John Boyne’s narrative, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ (BISP), he presents narrative voice and other literary devices to show his ideas. The novel introduces a German boy in the mid holocaust, who has left Berlin to live in a house near Auschwitz. He meets a Jewish boy who is held in Auschwitz and become friends with him. Boyne explores the theme of friendship, innocence and the theme of arbitrary boundaries. He uses characterisation, symbolism and dramatic to convey his main ideas.
In the book, Boyne shows us the theme of the power of friendship using narrative voice and characterisation. Bruno, while adventuring, met a boy named Shmuel, who was on the opposite sides of a fence. They meet, and quickly become friends. When Bruno was apologising to Shmuel about how he got in to trouble, he was truly sorry to what had happened, and lifted the fence, the symbolic and physical separation, wanting a handshake. “It was the first time they had ever touched”. Their …show more content…
Boyne questions how Bruno and Shmuel got to opposite sides of the fence, the divider between freedom and captivity. The two boys are mirror characters, but the Swastika and the Star of David is a symbol of arbitrary boundary, which allowed the Nazis to kill the Jews. When Shmuel drew the Star of David on the ground, Bruno drew the Swastika that he recalled his father wore. Shmuel stated “Yes, but they’re different aren’t they?” The key significance is that Shmuel is part of the Jews, the members that are getting oppressed by the Nazi’s, the side Bruno is on. Once Bruno changed from his clothes to the striped pyjamas, in Shmuel’s point of view, “It was almost as if they were exactly the same really”. While Shmuel is thinking of this, it is actually the whole general situation. The striped pyjamas symbolise nothing. The distinction between the Jews and German is arbitrary, they are all human