Reaction to The Reader :: Reader

Reaction to The Reader   In part II, chapter ogdoad of Bernhard Schlinks The Reader, the first-person narrator Michael describes reading the account indite by a absorption camp who had survived along with her mother, the soul survivors in a large root of women who were being marched away from the camp. He says, the throw...creates distance. It does not invite superstar to secernate with it and makes no one sympathetic... The same could be said of The Reader. The book is written in such a way as to distance one from the characters. It prevents people from sympathizing with Hanna or Michael or anyone else, taking a sort of detach view decimal point from their problems. This can be paralleled to the efforts of the German people towards Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or act with the past. In coping with Germanys Nazi history, the Germans attempted to distance themselves from it and the moral implications it presented. They seek to understand it without invo lving themselves in it, since involving themselves could implicate them. The one person in the book who cannot distance herself, Hanna, is still unsympathetic because everyone else distances themselves from her, making it impossible to sympathize with any aspect of her plight. Hanna is symbolic of German history in this respect.   As the narrator, Michael is peculiarly hard to sympathize with. The way he guides the story eschews emotional attachment. He himself feels detached from almost everything ....I felt nothing my feelings were numbed. His detachment transfers to the readers. None of his traits, or any of the situations he comes up against, makes one feel particularly patrician for him. Nothing makes one want to understand what hes going through or where hes coming from. He is simply there, dictating the story, telling us about his feelings without us getting involved. Further alienating is his tendency to fall into tangents which dont relate to the importa nt narrative. These tangents are even harder to muster interest in than the true point of the book and dont serve any discernible purpose, in the end causing us to separate even further from the story.   Michaels feelings of numbness and alienation--and, subsequently, the feelings of numbess and alienation that are produced in the books audience--reflect the attempts made by the German people to distance themselves from the spectres of the Nazi past.