Liesel’s Accordion

            Earlier in the book, Death had remarked that, though Liesel often wanted to ask Hans to teach her to play the accordion, she felt like she would never be as good as him anyway, not in the same way. She wanted to let it be his thing because she could never live up to the way he played. Then, in the bomb shelter, she started to read The Whistler, and eventually all of the frightened people in the shelter were silent and hanging on to her every word. The author described her reading: “she hauled the words in and breathed them out. A voice played notes inside of her. This, it said, is your accordion” (Zusak 381). The accordion here is used as a metaphor for the one thing you can master and call your own. Hans Hubermann is known for playing the accordion, and no one can play it quite like him. Now Liesel has discovered that this is her skill and what she loves- books. Even though she struggled so much earlier on with learning how to read, and has had to steal every book she owns, this is what she can be remembered for. Hans’s skill with the accordion brings people together and evokes emotions in them with the music. Liesel’s reading does the same. Her reading brought some semblance of peace to a chaotic room and gave the people something to concentrate on besides their gripping fear. The children stopped screaming and the adults stopped shaking. She already thought of herself as a book thief, now this group of people would also know her as the girl with the books. Like her father, she found something that she is good at in a way that no one else is. She used her words to save a roomful of people in turmoil. The author compared that skill and ownership to her father’s accordion because the readers already recognize the feelings Liesel has about her father and her love and awe of his skill with music, so saying that she found her accordion is much more powerful than saying she found something she was good at, loved, and would be remembered for. Most times in literature, it is much more effective to show something rather than specifically tell the audience. The author doesn’t need to talk about the significance of that moment and how it made Liesel feel, by saying “This...is your accordion” (Zusak 381) we can infer all of that information, and it’s much more powerful. He said all of that without saying anything more than a simple metaphor, and it spoke volumes so that he didn’t have to.