In the opening scene, death is trying to gain the reader's trust by talking to him/her as if it were a human being. The reader becomes confused at the beginning and then starts to accept the fact that death is a natural occurrence. Death is showing the reader that it was very busy during World War II. By the end of this scene, death managed to introduce itself as a main character and a reliable narrator for the book.
Maybe the doctor is unsavory because he find's himself in a difficult situation when the smell came all the way from the tree and trunks like a pungent
