The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

In creating a child protagonist and using his central consciousness in the novel, the author attaches readers to a boy’s worldview and his limited ability to understand everything that happens around him, especially in a situation as complex as wartime. Boyne does this to explore how children adapt to changes during wartime and, even more importantly, what they are able to make of the war as a complex mix of ideologies, divisions, nationalisms, and strategies.

Bruno is a German boy whose father becomes commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He has led a sheltered life, and he sees the world in black and white, as most children his age do. He does not grasp the full meaning of things happening around him: Thus, he finds it strange that people should crowd into one train instead of climbing aboard his own which is half-empty. Nothing in his life experience has prepared him to understand the “trains of death” used to transport imprisoned Jews to concentration camps. He observes the barbed-wire fence for the first time from the window of his new bedroom at “Out-With”; his natural curiosity leads him later to ask, “I don’t understand why we’re not allowed on the other side of it. What’s so wrong with us that we can’t go over there and play?” (278).

Again, as most children, he perceives the fence as something that keeps him out and not others in. Even though Bruno understands that something unusual takes place there, he is unable to comprehend the terrifying truth of thousands of deaths that occur every day next to his new home. When he hears of the disappearance of Shmuel’s grandfather and father, his child perspective does not allow him to connect their disappearance with death, and especially not at the hand of his father or the soldiers he learned to admire. When Shmuel states, “There aren’t any good soldiers” (216), Bruno rejects the very idea that his father might not be a good soldier because he sees him primarily as the family patriarch, whom he respects. He even unconsciously refuses to listen to the argument between his grandmother and father, because accepting Nathalie’s opinions would mean losing his sense of adoration towards his parent. 

On the other hand, Shmuel is forced to accept the realities of war to a much larger extent, because he is a Jew, and he has experienced the consequences of divisions and the horrible anti-Semitic nationalism that started the war. Naturally, his perceptions are still those of a child, and he is able to relate the story of losing his home and his family in a way that makes it seem almost adventurous thanks to the vitality of his youth. Although he lives in the camp and is a witness and victim of beatings and disappearances, he too refuses to accept the reality of thousands of deaths, including those of the members of his family. The author emphasizes that some truths are too complex and painful for a child to process consciously.

Crucially, both boys accept as natural the fact that there is a fence separating them and forbidding them to play together. They have not yet begun to question the decisions adults make—even though Bruno begins by taking issue with leaving Berlin—and they accept changes and adapt to them more readily than adults can. Boyne makes this trait of children one of the main themes of his novel because it offers a unique perspective on the atrocities of war. This also gives the readers, both young and adult, the chance to inhabit a worldview that despite everything does not recognize differences, divisions, war, or death.