In Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, clothing differentiates between people's jobs as well as social classes. For example, Maria usually wears a maid's uniform. Pavel wears striped pajamas during the day, but when he is a waiter he wears a uniform with a white jacket. Bruno even gets new shiny shoes to wear on the night that Hitler has dinner at the family's home in Berlin so that he looks good enough to present to the Furor. Also, his father's new uniform, worn by commandants, is clean, pressed, and made out of the best quality to represent Hitler's Nazi soldiers at their best. Of course, since Hitler's Nazi party and soldiers are considered the best in Germany, they should wear the best. When father wears his uniform at a dinner party with his parents, Bruno's mother asks if her husband doesn't look handsome in it. The meaning behind the uniform is more important to Grandmother than the fact that her son looks handsome. Bruno hears and observes his grandmother's response to the uniform as follows:
"'Handsome?' asked Grandmother leaning forward and staring at her daughter-in-law as if she had lost her reason. 'Handsome, did you say? You foolish girl! Is that what you consider to be of importance in the world? Looking handsome?'" (92).
While Bruno's mother and father are proud of his uniform and the status that comes with it, Grandmother clearly understands that the uniform represents more than just decoration for her son's looks. She is against the Nazis and does not appreciate the fact that her son is one of them. Bruno's father and mother are a part of the Nazi party and the German military, so when they get to Poland, they keep company with other soldiers who are dressed alike. Therefore, people dressed alike also spend time together. Bruno makes this interesting observation about clothing as follows:
"Father and Mother obviously enjoyed the company of the soldiers--Bruno could tell that. But they'd never once invited any of the striped pyjama people to dinner" (101).
This observation shows that Bruno can see the difference between who his parents spend time with based on clothing. Bruno is also quick to observe that everyone in the encampment wears the same striped clothing when he first arrives at Auschwitz as in the following passage:
". . . the small boys, the big boys, the fathers, the grandfathers, the uncles, the people who lived on their own on everybody's road but didn't seem to have any relatives at all--were wearing the same clothes as each other: a pair of grey striped pajamas with a grey striped cap on their heads" (38).
When he points these people out to his sister Gretel, she also observes that they are dirty. Being dirty also separates classes because those who are clean don't want to mix with those who aren't. When Bruno meets Shmuel for the first time, he makes a similar observation as follows:
"He wore the same striped pajamas that all the other people on that side of the fence wore, and a striped cloth cap on his head. He wasn't wearing any shoes or socks and his feet were rather dirty. On his arm he wore an armband with a star on it" (106).
Along with being dirty, Bruno notices another part of the clothing--the yellow star. The star is another status symbol that Jews are forced to wear during the Nazi regime so Germans would not mingle or do business with them. Bruno doesn't understand this, though, and it's because Bruno wears the striped pajamas at the end of the book that he is killed with Schmuel. If he had been wearing his daily clothes, he would have been easily identified as German and not killed.
No comments:
Post a Comment