Philip Kaifer Post 3

Of all of the novels we have read this year, The Reader stands out to be the most of a story, Schlink does not go out of his way to make philosophical breakthroughs that really aren’t significant. Instead, he tells the story of a man’s life, using his own thoughts and social interactions with other people to convey both the simple and the complex duality of life. This is one of the few stories where I was able to learn more not from its narrative, but its dialogue. Michael is faced with so many problems and throughout his life he has developed so many misconceptions that he is unable to gauge what is happening around him. The narrative of the story is entirely the thought process of Michael, and therefore it is clouded from the truth as well. The only accurate recollections that Michael makes involve the dialogue he has with others. When the dialogue is not present, the story is extremely hard to follow. He himself admits to this when he describes the lecture that he was preparing. His own thoughts and deductions about philosophy and law lead him to non-sequiturs and false conclusions about the events he remembers witnessing or reflecting on. Regarding Michael’s relationship with Hanna, there are so many parallels to Germany during World War Two. Hanna is representative of the Nazi regime while Michael represents the young, naïve population who willingly joined the Nazi party. This parallel also applies to Hanna when she was younger, when she joined the German occupation as a prison guard for the Nazi concentration camps. She was in essence used by Nazi Germany to attain its own goal while she had to suffer the consequences that lasted the rest of her life. Hanna in a way used Michael in order to get satisfaction and to feel appreciated as well as in control. Michael, meanwhile, is unable to control himself as a 15 year old boy and so he is easily manipulated and controlled by her, just like Hanna was controlled by Nazi Germany.