Chapter 10.How does the author take the reader into his confidence?

In Chapter Ten, Boyne sprinkles a bit of ironic humor into a story about horrific subject matter. When Bruno first sees Shmuel in the distance, he wonders about what kind of discovery this boy will be. Since he fancies himself an explorer, he considers that famous historical explorers never know what they will find: "[most] of the time they came across something interesting that was just sitting there, minding its own business, waiting to be discovered (such as America)" (105). This aside serves as a little joke to the reader, who is expected to know that America was, of course, not just waiting to be discovered by Europeans. There were entire advanced civilizations of people living there before the explorers Bruno has read about arrived. But as a child growing up in a German school system in the middle of the twentieth century, Bruno's understanding of American history is quite limited.