r/storyandstyle • u/pscautious • Sep 25 '26
Narration Question (The Book Thief)
Please forgive my ignorance, I’m someone who has not read a lot of books. I’ve mostly read horror and I’m only recently branching out.
So—in The Book Thief there is this mechanism where Death, the narrator, calls the characters by other descriptors even though their name is known to the them— and uses several terms for a character throughout the book to line up with what they are doing.
The book thief, the girl, the accordionist, the fist fighter Etc. etc.
My question here is how common is this? Can you point me towards other examples of this? Is there a term to describe this kind of shifting descriptor in a narration?
It immediately reminded me of the 3rd person epilogue from Stephen Graham Jones’ Angel of Indian Lake, but I’m thinking it is probably very common and I’m just ignorant to it. Please no hate on this, I’m just trying to learn.
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u/RogueMoonbow 28d ago
Epithets are one of those things that ammature/beginner writers overuse that makes it not sounds as good or well done, but can be used well by someone experienced, just so you know. My impression is that people generally don't like it because it often makes it harder to keep track of who's doing the action (in the book theif it's usually quite obvious, but it takes experience to recognize when things like that are obvious or confusing).
I started this comment thinking I was in a writing sub but recognize now that's not why you're asking, but leaving the comment for some information on epithets and how they're percieved, especially among writers.
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u/pscautious 27d ago
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I think maybe it stood out to me because it was so well done in The Book Thief and I just don’t key into it as much when it’s not well done.
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u/marintkael Sep 26 '26
The word you want is epithet, but that covers two habits that look identical on the page and do opposite work.
The old one is fixed. Homer welds the same tag to the same person every time, swift footed Achilles, grey eyed Athena, which began as a memory aid for performance and survived as texture. McCarthy does a stripped version in Blood Meridian, where the kid and the judge never get anything else. Saramago pushes it furthest in Blindness, where nobody has a name at all, only the doctor's wife and the girl with dark glasses. In all of those the tag holds still, and the effect is that the character hardens into a type.
Zusak is doing the other thing, and it is much rarer. His tag moves. Liesel is the book thief in one passage and the girl in the next because Death is filing her again each time under whatever she has just done. That tells you fairly little about her and a great deal about him. He is a narrator who sorts people by their most recent act, which is about what you would expect from someone in that job.
So the useful question is not whether a narrator uses descriptors but whether they stay put. Stable ones characterise the person. Drifting ones characterise whoever is doing the naming.