Essays on literary works - 2024

Review of John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Let’s start with the obvious — though it will be quickly dismantled. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is about the Holocaust. That’s the thesis of every library tag, school assignment, and tearful parental summary. But what if it isn’t? Or — more precisely — what if its relationship to the Holocaust is less about history and more about guilt management? About western cultural neurosis dressed in a child's striped uniform, as if innocence could be a counterweight to atrocity?

(And yes — let me say it now before the moralists come — this doesn’t mean the book doesn’t engage with horror. It does. It just does so in a dangerously simplified, almost fairytale-ish way, which might be its strength or its undoing, depending on your taste in metaphors and moral clarity.)

John Boyne’s novel, at its surface, is about Bruno — the son of a Nazi officer — who befriends Shmuel, a Jewish boy imprisoned in Auschwitz. But what it’s really about (maybe, probably, who knows?) is the liberal European subconscious trying to exorcise its post-1945 phantoms. And doing so through a story so unhistorical, so formally naïve, that it loops back around into something weirder and more compelling than mere realism: a kind of ideological ghost story in children’s clothes.

Let’s pause for a moment on the setting. Auschwitz. Or, well, “Out-With.” The book refuses to name it properly — a move some have called childish, others allegorical, and still others just lazy. But is this avoidance a narrative failure or an intentional distancing technique? (I don’t know. It irritates me. And yet — it intrigues me more than if it had been textbook-accurate.)

It’s as though Boyne doesn’t want us to see Auschwitz, only to feel it: like a bad dream half-remembered by someone else’s child. It’s all euphemism and soft focus — which is ethically troubling, yes, but maybe artistically revealing. This is not Primo Levi, it’s not Elie Wiesel. It’s a fable. But a fable for whom?

Bruno is, let’s be honest, unreasonably stupid. (He’s nine, yes — but not nine in any real-world way. He’s a symbolic nine, a European nine, a narrative device shaped like a child.) He doesn’t understand what’s going on. He doesn’t understand who Shmuel is. He doesn’t understand that his father is a genocidal bureaucrat. He sees a fence — a literal, electrified, barbed-wire fence — and thinks it’s just a line. A coincidence. Geography.

This idiocy is jarring. It has led many critics to accuse the novel of historical inaccuracy, of being irresponsible in its depiction of children’s understanding. But what if that’s the point? What if Bruno’s blindness is a metaphor not for childhood ignorance, but for cultural amnesia? For the way ideologies function through euphemism, routine, and “just following orders”? Bruno doesn’t know — because it is easier not to know.

And Shmuel? Shmuel isn’t so much a character as a mirror. He barely speaks. He’s thin. He’s hungry. He’s always sad, always available, always emotionally receptive to Bruno’s selfish whims. He exists, narratively, to teach Bruno empathy — which, let’s admit, is deeply problematic. It makes Shmuel into a sacrificial symbol, a ghost of Jewish suffering used to absolve a German boy’s soul.

(Here I want to scream a little. Because it’s 2025 and we’re still writing Jewish characters like this — passive, sweet, obliterated for someone else’s redemption. But also — maybe that’s what makes the novel worth analyzing. It’s a symptom of something. Literature often is.)

There’s something eerily Christian in this setup, too. Bruno — the sinless child of the sinner — crosses the fence, enters the camp, puts on the striped pajamas, and dies. It’s a parable of substitution, sacrifice, and unearned grace. But not Jewish grace. Christian grace. Atonement by association. The logic of “if only we had loved each other, the camps wouldn’t have happened.”

Which is, frankly, nonsense.

But again — what if the book isn’t lying about history, just showing how history is emotionally processed through myth? Bruno’s death is absurd. That no guard, no adult, no anyone notices a plump, clean, German child sneaking into a death camp — it’s laughable. But in that absurdity, something interesting happens: the horror becomes parabolic. The logic breaks down. And we are left not with the “truth,” but with a rupture in the narrative — a Derridean gap, if you like, where meaning deconstructs under the pressure of its own sentimentality.

(I know. “Derrida” and “Boyne” in the same sentence. Blasphemy. But tell me this doesn’t beg for it.)

The book doesn’t just collapse the boundary between inside and outside (camp/family, victim/perpetrator). It collapses the boundary between history and allegory. Between reader and author. And in that collapse, something disorienting happens. You finish the book — maybe crying, maybe furious, maybe both — and you’re not sure what you’ve learned. Or whether you should have learned anything at all.

Is the message “Nazis are bad”? Too easy. Is it “Children are innocent”? Insulting. Is it “Fences are cruel”? Banality with barbed wire. But maybe, just maybe, the novel is less about giving a message and more about exposing how desperately we want one.

There’s also something to be said — uneasily — about gender in this text. The mother is mostly absent. Passive. Unwilling. She represents, perhaps, the “good German,” horrified but complicit. And Gretel — Bruno’s sister — is a parody of femininity: obsessed with dolls, then Nazis, then nothing. The boys (Bruno, Shmuel) are the emotional core, the sacrificial lambs. The women are sidelined, shadowed. There’s a patriarchal undertone here that feels unintentional — which makes it more telling. As though empathy itself is gendered in this universe.

But — and this is the annoying thing about literature — for all its flaws, this novel works. Not as history. Not as education. But as emotional provocation. It makes people cry. It makes them talk. It is, in a strange way, a cultural phenomenon. Which doesn’t absolve it of its sins, but does demand that we analyze why so many people embraced it.

I remember (by the way) a conversation I had in a bookstore. Someone picked up the novel and said, “Oh, this changed my life.” And I wanted to ask — how? What life were you living that needed this fable to show you that genocide is bad? But I said nothing. Because we don’t read to learn — we read to feel. And The Boy in the Striped Pajamas offers feeling in spades. Cheap or not, that’s powerful.

And yet — one more thought before we close this non-closure — maybe the most radical reading of Boyne’s book is to see it not as Holocaust literature, but as a novel about Holocaust literature. About the failure of language, of narrative, of genre to contain atrocity. It gestures at history, and fails. It tries to speak, and stutters. That failure — if read knowingly — could be its deepest truth.

(But does Boyne know this? I doubt it. Which makes it all the more fascinating.)

The ending, with Bruno’s parents discovering the truth, tries to deliver pathos. It almost works. Almost. But the structure buckles. And maybe that’s the moment we realize: this is not a story about what happened. It’s a story about what we fear might still happen — if we forget, if we lie to ourselves, if we fence off pain behind euphemisms and bedtime stories.

In other words — the fence isn’t the camp. It’s the genre. And Bruno’s death isn’t a historical tragedy. It’s the narrative breaking itself to show you the cost of narrative comfort.

So — is this a good book?

I don’t know. But it’s a revealing one. Which, for criticism — and maybe even for ethics — is better.