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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

ClassicsHistorical Fiction
Pages
224
Published
2006
Language
English

Synopsis

Nine-year-old Bruno is unhappy when his family leaves their comfortable home in Berlin for a bleak new house in a place he hears as "Out-With," where his father — a high-ranking officer — has been posted. From his bedroom window, Bruno can see a strange settlement behind a long wire fence, where hundreds of people in what look to him like striped pyjamas live behind the wire.

Bored and lonely, Bruno follows the fence one day and meets Shmuel, a boy his own age sitting on the other side. The two strike up a secret friendship across the wire, though Bruno never truly understands where he is, who Shmuel is, or what the fence really means. His innocence — and the reader's terrible knowledge of what he cannot see — drives the story toward its devastating conclusion.

John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a spare, fable-like novel of the Holocaust told through a child's uncomprehending eyes. Widely read and widely taught, it has also drawn criticism from historians for the historical liberties it takes.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

SadEmotionalDarkMelancholic

Genres

Classics Historical Fiction World War II Young Adult Children's Books Drama Adventure Literary Fiction

About the author

J
John Boyne

John Boyne is an Irish novelist born in Dublin. He studied English at Trinity College Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where he won the Curtis Brown prize. His novels for adults include The House of Special Purpose, The Absolutist and The Heart's Invisible Furies, and he also writes for younger readers. His best-known book, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a film, a play, an opera and a ballet.

Characters

Bruno (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas)Protagonist

A naive nine-year-old German boy, son of the camp's commandant, who understands almost nothing of where his family has been sent.

Shmuel (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas)Protagonist

A nine-year-old Jewish boy imprisoned in the camp, whom Bruno meets and befriends through the wire fence.

Lieutenant Kotler (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas)Antagonist

An arrogant and cruel young SS officer stationed at the camp.

Ralf (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas)Supporting

Bruno's father, the SS Commandant given charge of the camp.

Elsa (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas)Supporting

Bruno's mother, at first devoted to her husband and increasingly horrified by what his posting means.

All characters in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Frequently asked questions

  • What is "Out-With" in the book?

    "Out-With" is nine-year-old Bruno's mishearing of Auschwitz, the concentration camp his father has been posted to command. Boyne keeps the narration inside Bruno's limited understanding throughout, so the camp is never named directly — the same device gives us "the Fury" for the Führer. The reader is meant to recognise what Bruno cannot.

  • Is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas based on a true story?

    No. Boyne subtitled it "A Fable" and wrote it as invention rather than history, and historians have been sharply critical of the liberties it takes — the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has advised against using it to teach the Holocaust, on the grounds that its central premise (a camp perimeter a child could reach and slip under, and a commandant's son ignorant of what the camp was) misrepresents how Auschwitz worked. A 2009 survey nonetheless found that around 70% of readers asked believed the story was factually based, which is part of why the criticism is so persistent.

  • Is there a sequel?

    Yes. John Boyne published All the Broken Places in 2022, sixteen years after this book. It follows Bruno's older sister Gretel, now ninety-one and living in London, through the life she built in Paris and Australia after the war and the reckoning that comes when a new family moves into her building. It is a novel for adults rather than a companion for younger readers.

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