Previous
Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas fits into two genres. First, it’s historical fiction, as it tells a story grounded in the real events of World War II and the Holocaust through a fictionalized lens. The novel focuses on the imagined friendship between Bruno, the son of a Nazi officer, and Shmuel, a Jewish boy imprisoned at Auschwitz. The lives of Bruno’s family, especially his father’s work as the Commandant of the concentration camp, are the background against which this secret friendship plays out. Through imagining Bruno and Shmuel’s developing friendship, the author examines the devastating realities of the Holocaust in a way that makes them feel personal. The reader learns about the atrocities at Auschwitz through the lens of a child seeing them for the first time. They gain context and understanding as Bruno does, though they quickly begin to suspect more than he understands about his world.
The novel is also a work of young adult (YA) fiction. As a book aimed toward an adolescent and teenage audience, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas aims to make complex and difficult historical events accessible to younger readers. It achieves this by using Bruno’s perspective to explain how things happen in simple terms. The protagonists of the novel are young boys, which makes their experiences relatable to the book’s primary audience. The novel also has all of the structural conventions of YA fiction: clear, simple language, intense moral and emotional conflicts, and an uncomplicated plot that guides the reader carefully from start to finish.
The genre choice accomplishes several goals. By fictionalizing a friendship between a Nazi child and an imprisoned Jewish boy, the novel personalizes the tragedy of the Holocaust. The story also introduces key elements of Holocaust history for a younger audience, including the complicity of families like Bruno’s with the Nazi regime. The fact that Bruno’s family seems relatively ordinary at the beginning of the novel is a key element in the story. Thus, even though Bruno’s mother doesn’t murder anyone, she’s just as complicit in the deaths of people like Shmuel and Pavel as Bruno's father the Commandant or the cruel Lieutenant Kohler. Through this exploration of complicity, the novel shows that evil and prejudice don’t always come from the places that one might expect.
Related Themes:
