Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, antisemitism, graphic violence, and emotional abuse.

“The rain gurgled down the gutter, hiccupped at a bit of rock, then sped down and round the corner to the creek. A cow mooed sadly across the wet grass.”

This quote uses alliteration (“gurgled,” “grass”), vivid imagery, and personification to create sensory imagery with a hint of poetry. The rain “hiccupping” personifies the weather, and the cow’s mooing reinforces Mark’s simple but somber existence. The cows, appearing in the rain, symbolize Mark’s contemplative mood and the rural setting that shapes his somewhat isolated view of the world.

“But we can’t have a story about something that’s not real.”

This quote shows Mark’s struggle with the line between fiction and reality, and his unease with imagining a made-up story involving real historical figures. This is also part of Storytelling as a Means of Understanding the Past. His black-and-white thinking at this stage shows his limited understanding of how fiction can be used to reflect real emotional and historical truths.

“I bet Hitler never loved anyone.”

This statement shows Mark’s moral framework as it originally exists, in a simple form with black-and-white ways of thinking. He sees Hitler as a figure of pure evil, almost inhuman, and incapable of emotion. Mark’s ideas of good versus evil, a motif in the novel, and the line between them starts to shift as he hears more of Heidi’s story.