Reaction to The Reader :: Reader

Reaction to The Reader   In part II, chapter eight of Bernhard Schlinks The Reader, the first-person narrator Michael describes reading the account written by a concentration camp who had survived on with her mother, the soul survivors in a large group of women who were being marched away from the camp. He says, the book...creates exceed. It does not invite one to identify with it and makes no one sympathetic... The uniform 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 bothone else, taking a sort of detached viewpoint from their problems. This can be paralleled to the efforts of the German people towards Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coping with the past. In coping with Germanys Nazi history, the Germans attempted to distance themselves from it and the moral implications it presented. They tried to understand it without involving themselve s 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 understand with any aspect of her plight. Hanna is symbolic of German history in this respect.   As the narrator, Michael is particularly 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 sorry for him. nix 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. advertize alienating is his tendency to fall into tangents which dont relate to the main narrative. These tang ents 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.