Hernán Prieto Reaction 3

I continued to read the novel "The Reader" I found myself in a peculiar place. Over the first two parts of the novel my emotions were clear as to the character of Hanna. She was a woman who was clearly taking advantage of a minor, not only physically but also mentally. Mentally as in when Michael when he found out that Hanna had left or as he said abandoned her life and completely disappeared this created a series of events that lead to his mental instability (throwing up, not eating) when this occurred I as the reader felt relief, and in a sense figured that Michael was no longer going to be affected by him. The sense of disgust towards her was slowly fading, until we found out that she was a nazi, it was when her trial began to go down hill (as expected), she was sentenced to jail and then ends up committing suicide, and also we find out that she was illiterate that's when my emotions are changed, although very little, although contradicting, I did find myself feeling bad for her. And the situation she was in. 

When I finished the novel, I couldn't understand if I liked the novel or if I didn't but it was interesting and in a sense it did help in an insightful way.

Jerry Bonnell Reaction #3

By the conclusion of The Reader, I have come to realize that innocence and guilt are not necessarily absolutes. We  attempt to maintain order and balance by manifesting our ideals in a judiciary system. However, despite our best efforts, even the structured Court is more inconsistent in nature than we would like to admit. Trials are a search for factual evidence leading to a black-and-white judgment devoid of nuance and inconsiderate of human emotion and consciousness. By making rulings according to laws and precedent, the judicial system fails to recognize the complexities and incongruities of human nature. We are not perfect, though the judiciary holds us to a false notion of perfection.

Enter Hanna, the woman on trial for War Crimes as an SS officer during World War II. From the moment of her introduction, it is clear that she is not perfect. She makes a morally ambiguous decision of seducing a teenage boy, and subsequently leaving him without a formal farewell. We are automatically forced to hold a strong prejudice against her actions. “What is wrong with her and why would she deceive such a young boy?” are questions that we ask during the novel’s unraveling. When she is revealed to have been a former SS officer during the war, these questions suddenly have an answer. We assume that she is a caricature of a Nazi, as depicted by the media. But, in fact, her role during the war is not much different from that of an Allied soldier, in that she followed orders and tried to help ease the pain of her prisoners when she could. It can be said that she made the best of a bad situation and that given her position, it would have been difficult to make different decisions. This is most apparent when she questions the presiding judge on the trial. “What would you have done?” she asks, and he is unable to respond. Yet even the reader is lured into this question. What is the appropriate course of action? To follow orders or to accept death? Can a person be held to the impossible standard of upholding morality while also faced with a life-or-death situation?

This book masterfully tackles some of the deepest questions of our human nature, without pushing the political envelope too far. In the case of Hanna, was she supposed to act altruistically or in the interest of her self-survival? Likewise, does Michael’s love for Hanna change the gruesomeness of her seduction and arguably her abuse of him as a teenager?  

Chris Winters reaction #3

Part 3 of the reader found me a bit befuddled. I kept. Coming back to the idea of this awkward and rather unsuitable relationship between Michael and Hanna. As a result of his young relationship with her it in essence scars him for the rest of his life ultimately leading to Michael showing no love and desire to be with his wife Gertrude. I know that Michael is glad to have had the relationship with Hanna but in the end it prevents him from ever loving again, losing his wife Gertrude, and denying the rights to his daughter as he so mentions in the story.

What I ultimately thought this book was getting at was that not every boy has the luxury of a complete childhood, whereas for a lot of kids we wait until the age of 18 before we accept the full range of our responsibilities and privileges of adulthood. In some cases children will have doting parents that cocoon them until they are 30 years old, never letting them experience the real world.

Overall I did enjoy reading this book, even though the ending was one that caught me off guard and frustration that Michael created in my mind. It was a rather quick read and it seems as though that might have made it a bit of a better read since the beginning was a bit disturbing depending on who you ask. In he end I found it fitting that the author inserted what seemed to be a somewhat happy ending by dedicating pretty much the life of Hanna to help those who are illiterate and as we'll those affected by the Holocaust.

Luis Santos #3

I ended up enjoying the book. The third part was my favorite because it contained such a big plot twist. I was not expecting Hanna to kill herself. Not even close. I thought she was going to be released and live with Michael. But no. The lady kills herself. I guess she did it because she knew she was not going to be able to adapt to life outside of the prison. I just didn’t understand the relationship Michael has with her once he goes to visit her. I couldn’t tell if they still had feelings for each other. Even though Michael claims thought out the whole second and third part of the book that when he looks at Hanna he feel nothing, why does he think about her so much? And also, why does he read her so many books while she is in prison? He says he doesn’t feel anything for her, but then he does things that suggest he really loves her, and then to top it all off, once she does die, he only visits her once in the cemetery. Why did he only see her one time? And it was not even a visit that he wanted to do, it was a visit that he felt he had to do once he received a letter from the Jewish Organization. I also found it interesting how the author decided to finally tell readers the protagonist’s name with only a couple of pages left of the book. Its as if he finally became a person. He finally became someone once Hanna died. Because while Hanna was a live, we only knew Michael as “kid”. And then after she hangs herself we learn that his real name is Michael. As the story came to and end, I started to feel really bad for Michael. I realized how he had practically thrown his life away. Its like Hanna was his peak. That’s when he was the happiest and then everything when downhill from there. He numbed himself so hard, that he became unable to feel any kind of emotion. His life became somewhat meaningless.

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.

Olivia Thaler blog 3

Firstly I would like to talk philosophically about something I read. During the trial, Hanna shows her wittiness as she reverses the roles between her and the judge and practically makes the judge look pathetic. They asked her if she understood that she was sending people to their deaths. She replied that the as more people came in, they had to make room for those new ones, and had to kill the old ones. She then asked the judge what it is that he would have done if he was put in that situation. The entire room and the judge were dumbfounded, and the judge ended up finding a way to answer the question, without answering it completely. This is very controversial because it has to do with the value of human life and whether one should act indifferently towards it. Does one person’s value ever outweigh another person’s? She clearly did not have an option. I was impressed with the way Hanna handled the entire situation. It seems to me that she would rather spend time in prison than face feelings of shame and guilt. She did not lie or try to go around the truth, rather, she pointed out things in the defense that were unfair to ask. At times, her own lawyer could not get her to act in the way he thought was appropriate and that may have got her out of more jail time. I respected her for living up to the truth and still remaining strong and respectful; but I do not agree that what she did should be respected. Michael’s life after the trial can be considered “messed up.” He becomes ill again. I think seeing Hanna and her trial brought back these feelings. This was brought back to him because of his previous relationship with her and because he cannot handle the understanding or accept everything that occurred in Germany. 

Alan Armony's Reaction #2

I enjoyed this section of the book much more than the first part. Before I even started reading the second part, I knew two things. I knew that this part was going to be much more interesting and I knew that Hanna Schmitz would come back in to the story. I was right about both. As soon as I learned that the case that Michael was studying had to do with a group of women, I had a feeling one of them was Hanna. What I was not expecting was that in the end we would learn that she was illiterate. This explains why she wasn’t promoted to a better job. This also confuses Michael and what he thinks of Hanna. He feels bad for her knowing that she wasn’t promoted because she couldn’t read and she had to keep this secret for so long, but he also has a distaste for her for helping to kill all these innocent jewish women. The reader also learns that she forced these women to read to her before their deaths. This could have a double understanding as well. Michael feels like she could have been soothing these women before they had to face death or she could have simply been using them to learn how to read and write and then killing them so that they wouldn’t tell her secret. I think that Hanna’s illiteracy is a parallel to the jewish women. These women were simply born into jewish families, they did not choose to be jewish or to be killed like this, surely if they knew they would be killed for being jewish and they had the choice, they would most likely choose not to be jewish. Similarly, Hanna did not choose to be illiterate, she was born into it. Now she is being prosecuted because she was the one looking over these women. She was looking over these women because she had not been promoted and she had not been promoted since she was illiterate. Therefore, she was being prosecuted because she was illiterate. I hope the final part is as interesting as the second.