Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Same World, Different Voices Children and Childhood in British and American Fiction, Alper Tulgar,Meryem Odabaşı, Editör, Çizgi Kitabevi Yayınları, Konya, ss.135-160, 2022
John Boyne’s Ideologically Victimised Children 1
This chapter examines John Boyne’s best-selling book The Boy in Striped Pyjamas (2006) and
claims that racist ideologies like Nazism lead to the downfall of children who at that age are
expected just to play and dream. John Boyne, one of the prolific writers in British literature, tells the
story of nine years old boys named Bruno and Shmuel in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The son
of a Nazi commander, Bruno, has to move from Berlin to a very close house to Auschwitz-
Birkenau, where he befriends Shmuel, one of the camp residents. During their heroic friendship,
they are unaware of the social inequality and the sadistic and destructive ideological policy of
Nazism. Nazi’s racist ideology and the authoritarian bourgeois father try to convince Bruno that the
people on the other side of the barbed wires are guilty, belong to the lower class, and do not deserve
any sympathy from Germans. As stated by Karl Marx, the oppression of the Fatherland shows the
reader that literature has no separate space, and literary works are not isolated from social and
political conditions.
Moreover, literature is a form of ideology that legalises the ruling class’s power, as in the case of
the child narrator Bruno who struggles to free himself from nationalistic ideologies. Thus, the role
of the author is significant to prevent literature from serving the ideology of the dominant class, the
Nazis in this case, and to challenge societal norms, which play a vital role in the victimisation of the
concentration camp inmates. So this paper focuses on analysing John Boyne’s novel in light of
Marxist literary criticism to show the Nazis’ oppressive ideological attitudes towards other classes
in the story and the victimisation of the innocent Bruno and Shmuel during the Holocaust.