Approach of the Study Method of the Study

Congress of Rough Riders 2001, Crippen 2004, Next of Kin 2006, Mutiny on the Bounty 2008, and The House of Special Purpose 2009. The story is told from the perspective of Bruno, a nine year old boy whose father, a Nazi officer, has been promoted to a higher position. This event leads Bruno’s family to move to a place near Auschwitz, a concentration camp. From the window in his new house, Bruno sees the camp with many people dressing in striped pajamas living in it. His curiosity and boredom in that isolated place lead him to sneak from his house and follow the path to the camp, where he meets Shmuel, a Jewish boy. Almost every day, they meet at the same spot and talk. Their friendship lasts for almost a year until one day, for the reason of helping Shmuel to find his father who is missing inside the camp, Bruno decides to climb under the fence and finally is able to join Shmuel on the other side of the fence. The story ends in a tragic ending, with the two boys lost their lives in the camp as they are accidentally trapped in the gas chamber.

3.2 Approach of the Study

The approaches applied in this study were the psychological approach and the sociocultural-historical approach. According to Rohrberger and Woods, Jr. 9- 10, sociocultural-historical approach investigates a literary work from its relation with social, cultural, and history of a certain time and place when the work is created. The setting of time and place in this novel and its condition of civilization give the reader description of the real society. The psychological approach considers that each character’s behaviour could be referred to the psychology of human being, resulting in the deeper interpretation of each character’s actions and behaviours 16. Therefore, the psychological approach and sociocultural-historical approach were appropriate to answer the problem formulation of the extraordinary relationship between Bruno and Shmuel which is related to the social condition in World War II period.

3.3 Method of the Study

Library research was applied as the method in this study. In library research, data are gathered from written sources such as books and journals. In doing this study, a series of steps were taken. The first step was reading the book to get the understanding of the story and the topic of the study. The second step was finding the problem and formulating research questions of the study. The third step was collecting the data and supporting sources. The next step was analyzing the problem using the data previously gathered. The last step was drawing a conclusion. The first step was reading the novel. It must be repeated several times to really get the comprehension about the story since the novel raises a heavy and complicated theme. Reading the novel is also intended to find the topic worth to discuss in the study. The second step, finding the problem formulation, aimed to develop the questions that were going to be analyzed and answered in this study. The next step was collecting the data. A lot of sources related to the topic were used as references to support this study, including books, journals and other written sources collected from the Internet. The data were used to help analyzing the problem, allowing the writer to conduct a deep analysis about the topic chosen in this study. In the last step, a conclusion was drawn based on the analysis. 24

CHAPTER 4 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION