Is Death really fair?

[baazjhaj]

Death makes the claim that he is very fair in the way we works"I'm nothing if not fair (- Death pg. 3).” Do you agree with this statement, given how many lives he must cut short.

[Kaylee Buntyn]

Death is honestly neither fair nor unfair. The reason for this is yes, everyone must dies at some point in time, making death fair, but when death cuts their lives short it becomes unjust. In The Book Thief, various people died such as Werner being one of the firsts in the beginning to Papa and Mama dying as well, you kind of have to think about it like this, they were going to die anyways and death decided it needed to be sooner rather then later whether it was a good thing or not.

[domtoye]

I think he is fair, as although he takes the souls of people, he was never the one who decided who or when. It was his job, and he did it as fairly as he could.

[jackh]

I don't know whether his "faireness" has anything to do with him taking people at death. I also don't think that he is the one that "cuts their lives short". The way death seemed to work was that when people died, whatever the cause, he appeared and would take their soul away. Never did he actually kill the people, nor did he ever set up their death or the cause of it. I think that the author meant for his role to be more that of a deliverer. He said many times that he hated the wars, the deaths, and the destruction. He said he was terrified of humans and that destruction was one of their greatest qualities. I think in this book, the author meant to show how the humans themselves were delivering death, and death was just delivering them to some sort of afterlife once their fellow humans killed them. I think using death as a narrator helped to illustrate the points about destruction and the massive terror and unrest throughout Europe at that time that would have been harder to illustrate indirectly in the story.

[sofiamq123]

To really understand if death is fair or not, we must decide what "fairness" really is. The most common way of fairness is a cause and effect kind of situation. One can also measure death from the point of "was it an adequate time for the person to die?". As one can see "fairness: can change based of off what point you look at it. Death can be both fair and unfair. The death of Rudy can be taken. His death can be taken as "fair" as a cause and effect situtation. Rudy was near a bomb when it exploded and therefore it is considered "fair" because the effect(death) was what one would expect from the cause(the explosion). Rudy's death can also be taken as "unfair" from the point of view of the adequate time to die. Rudy was too young to die, he had a life ahead of him, he was gonna become a great man.There are also other points of view to look at "fairness" of death that I did not mention, the author does this to give more complexity to the book, to make readers question and consider different points of view of "fairness". My question is, from what point of view do you think its fair?