The Reader

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-9

Part 1, Chapters 10-17

Part 2, Chapters 1-9

Part 2, Chapters 10-17

Part 3, Chapters 1-6

Part 3, Chapters 7-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Literacy

Literacy symbolizes both communication and arrogance. While Michael and Hanna have problems communicating about fights and her past, they don’t have issues regarding reading. Hanna can’t read, but she thoughtfully listens as Michael reads aloud to her. Reading becomes a dynamic exchange. Michael says they don’t share a world, but they share the world of the books they read together. As such, reading symbolizes their bond and feelings. It becomes a two-person activity. Hanna isn’t a passive listener. She participates, with Michael noting, “Her laugh, her sniffs of contempt, and her angry or enthusiastic remarks left no doubt that she was following the action intently” (37). Hanna’s diverse feedback indicates that she’s not uncultured. She can process the texts and engage them.

By reading to her, Michael communicates his interests—what he’s learning in school or what’s on his mind. For example, when he studies Greek culture in school, he reads her The Odyssey. In jail, reading becomes a way for him to maintain communication with her. It’s not the personal communication Hanna wants, but it’s genuine communication nonetheless. Reading becomes a symbol of expression. Through reading, Michael communicates his lifelong devotion to Hanna. Likewise, as Hanna learns to read, she reads thinkers like Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt to process her own actions.

During the trial, literacy acquires negative symbolism. The literate judges and participants are smug and self-serving. Unlike Michael, they don’t use their reading and writing skills to explore disturbing truths. Literacy becomes a trick—a way for the trial members to distort the truth and force a narrative on Hanna. Hanna asks the judge, “What would you have done?” The judge replies, “There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb” (86). His obtuse answer creates an ironic juxtaposition. The illiterate Hanna comes across as forthright, while the literate judge appears relatively mindless. In the court setting, literacy turns into a symbol of arrogance or faux superiority.

The Trial

The trial itself symbolizes injustice. Michael presents the proceedings as neither fair nor comprehensive. Nazi lawyers and impatient judges taint it. Michael observes, “I sometimes had the sense that the court had had enough, that they wanted to get the whole thing over with” (106). In a just setting, the length of the trial would be irrelevant. The trial would last until it discovered the truth of the charges, even if the truth countered norms about how to assign guilt to participants in the Holocaust. Hanna endures a show trial—it’s a performance—and she receives the role of “the main protagonist and guilty party” (106). She gets a life sentence and disproportionate blame, and the public can feel morally superior.

For Michael, the truth is that “[Hanna] was guilty, but not as guilty as it appeared” (106). Imagining a competent defense, Michael asks questions that betray the fraught process of assigning guilt. He uses the fragility of time and memory to hypothetically sow doubts about witness testimony. He notes, “The five defendants had not been in charge of the camp. There was a commandant, plus special troops, and other female guards” (87). The camps had an extensive administrative apparatus, so it’s impossible to know what Hanna was responsible for and what she wasn’t. Michael raises questions that destabilize the court’s skewed narrative. As critical analysis is absent in the trial, it’s difficult to claim that the trial dispenses justice.

Accepting and Evading Guilt

The motif of accepting and evading guilt supports the three major themes. Michael feels guilty because he has intense feelings for Hanna; he feels guilty for not disclosing her illiteracy to the court and for loving her. As Michael puts it, “[I]f I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal (104). Michael doesn’t try to evade guilt, though he tries to numb himself to Hanna. Ultimately, he accepts that he loves Hanna, someone who participated in the Holocaust. He doesn’t keep his guilty feelings a secret. He exhaustively interrogates them and tries to come to an understanding.

Like the trial members, the West German student movement appears more like a spectacle than a substantial inventory of guilt. Michael describes their “sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes” (131). Like time and memory, guilt is malleable. It doesn’t restrict itself to a period or generation. These students love their parents—people who presumably participated or somehow complied with genocidal norms—and love is a form of transmission. Through love, a person receives another person’s guilt. There is no way to neatly assign guilt, and there is no way to tidily categorize feelings, secrets, understanding, or time. These are messy, fraught concepts.