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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Weather Report:
In Part 5: The Gambler (A Seven-Sided Die), Max asks Liesel to tell him what the weather is like outside. She uses imagery and two similes to describe it:
“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole ….”
Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that. On the wall, he painted a long, tightly knotted rope with a dripping yellow sun at the end of it, as if you could dive right into it.
Liesel's language is imaginative. While it is odd to hear a cloud compared to a rope and the sun compared to a hole, Max finds that the strange specificity of her words help him envision the outside where he has not set foot in a year. The imagery inspires him to paint a scene on the wall of the basement. He even builds on Liesel's similes, turning the cloud into a tightrope the two of them balance on together as they walk toward the sun.
Death often uses imagery to describe what the sky looks like as he carries souls away. Liesel's playful description of the sky is similarly poetic, demonstrating that she, like Death, is an apt storyteller. However, instead of a mournful monument to someone's death, Liesel's poetic description is a gift for Max. It provides him with the hope that even though he is stuck in the dark, he and Liesel might be walking together toward some brighter future.
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