Reading Too Much Into Narration

Currently I am reading I Am The Messenger, a novel by Markus Zusak. I have read only one other book of his, The Book Thief, which takes place in Nazi Germany and tells the story of a girl who steals books (and, at one point, helps hide a Jew in the cellar). Clearly the two books are significantly different: Messenger is a bout the strange turn Ed Kennedy's mediocre life takes when he finds the ace of diamonds in his mailbox and follows the instructions written on it. The books are equally well-written, but the style and tone differ greatly between them, although sometimes for obvious reasons. The Book Thief has considerable overtones of death because of the setting, particularly in the second half, and many of the later lighthearted moments are full of the knowledge that they could end at any time. Messenger is altogether a less serious book; it has several serious events, but the humour in this book is much more common than in the other. Additionally, more of the serious events in the latter book have positive effects.

The changes in style between the two books, however, are quite notable. When reading The Book Thief, I had thought that it was simply written in the author's usual way. The narration was littered with moments of grimness and reflection, and contained amounts of visual description considered standard for most literature. Messenger has a style inconsistent with that of the other book. Physical description is less specific; the appearances of characters and objects are explained in broad strokes, like Ed's house, which is a "shack", or his friend Ritchie, who has a "man-boyish face". Some characters, like Marv, don't get any physical description and little of any other kind expositionally, despite importance to the story. The largest block of description of a person, apart from Ed's outline of his own character, is this:

"Audrey always sits opposite me, no matter where we play [cards]. She has yellow hair, wiry legs, the most beautiful crooked smile in the world, and lovely hips, and she watches a lot of movies." (15)

Compare that to The Book Thief's Liesel Meminger on her arrival on Himmel Street:

"Upon her arrival, you could still see the bite marks of snow on her hands and the frosty blood on her fingers. Everything about her was undernourished. Wirelike shins. Coat hanger arms. She did not produce it easily, but when it came, she had a starving smile.
Her hair was a close enough brand of German blond, but she had dangerous eyes. Dark brown. You didn't really want brown eyes in Germany around that time. Perhaps she received them from her father, but she had no way of knowing, as she couldn't remember him." (31)

Quite a contrast. The reason for this may seem unclear at first, because the narrator of The Book Thief is rarely present at events and easily forgotten. Both books are written in the first person; The Book Thief is narrated by Death himself, Messenger by Ed. Before I continue, I must tell you that I have read many first-person books where the style of narration was standard for the author, not specific to the character--or multiple books by one person where the author always chose the same kind of person to narrate. Zusak's books are different. They are told by very different people, recording the impressions of the character rather than the author--and, most importantly, characterize greatly with a thing as simple as how a person is described. Death, with good reason, sees a lot of things with the overtones of doom that serve as a constant undercurrent to his book. He does a lot of thinking in general, reflects on events and implications with great frequency and depth, and this is the way he talks about everything. Ed, on the other hand, doesn't really look deeply into things. Most of his description is surface impressions; the most in-depth description is of Audrey, who he later admits he's in (unreciprocated) love with, and even his discussion of his own character is fairly superficial. He accepts that his life is mediocre and unremarkable, he assumes that this will not change in the future, and he lives his life accordingly. He is, usually, a passive kind of person.

Of course, at this point I am only halfway into the book, and I do not know that this state of affairs will continue. Ed's life becomes much more interesting when the first ace shows up in the mail, disrupting his pleasantly average existence. Perhaps as the book continues and he follows the instructions on all the aces, his observations of his surroundings will gain more depth. But even without certainty of this happening, it remains clear that Zusak tailors his writing to the views of his characters to a greater degree than is usually seen.