The Reader

1
The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink

• Stylistic Features
• Language Techniques

2
Stylistic Features Language Techniques

• Narrator
• Schlink's use of a first person narrative
  throughout the novel lends a credibility
  necessary to this type of fictional personal
  account. The first half of the story deals only
  with a young Michael and allows the reader to
  watch his transition into manhood.
• The language Schlink uses to describe Michael's
  recollections of the first time he saw Hanna's
  naked body beautifully capture his naiveté. The
  scene in which Michael loses his virginity to
  Hanna is written so eloquently, it's as if the
  author is recalling his own life.
• The Gazette 2000

3
Stylistic Features Language Techniques

• Tone
• Michael's narration of the story, which is very
  interior in its focus, creates a very
  contemplative and introspective mood.
• Schlink creates this through the use of an
  interior monologue full of questions that both
  the narrator and the reader want to answer.
• In the second half of the novel the romantic tone
  of the story changes to a much heavier one, as
  Michael attends a criminal trial seminar only to
  find Hanna is the woman accused of terrible war
  crimes.
• Schlink brilliantly writes a heavy subject matter
  in a lighter tone while maintaining
  respectability.

4
Stylistic Features Language Techniques

• Style
• Schlink uses both an unsentimental tone of the
  detective novels he had previously written and a
  more reflective, sometimes poetic, approach more
  consistent with the weighty material.
• The former is exemplified by the bluntness of
  chapter openings at key turns in the plot, like
  "Next morning, Hanna was dead."
• The latter comes into play in passages like "It
  was one of the pictures of Hanna that has stayed
  with me. I have them stored away, I can project
  them on a mental screen and watch them,
  unchanged, unconsumed."
• He also deftly uses chiasmus at times to
  accentuate Michael's confusion.
• Wikipedia 2006

5
Technique Chiasmus

• chiasmus kee AZZ muss (Figure of Speech)   the
  criss-cross figure
• Its Greek for the letter X. The chiasmus
  contains two groups of words that mirror each
  other.  You can take the boy out of the country,
  but you cant take the country out of the boy.
• There was a belief that figures like the chiasmus
  triggered our instinctive love of expressive
  rhythm.  It worked for John F. Kennedy when he
  told young people, Ask not what your country can
  do for you, ask what you can do for your
  country, thousands of them joined the Peace
  Corps.
• From the novel "I didn't reveal anything I
  should have kept to myself. I kept to myself
  something I should have revealed.

6
The setting

• Important as the novel is set in post WWII
  Germany.
• Novel tackles the problems of forgiveness and
  guilt and the denial of truth in the wake of the
  holocaust
• Schlink asks the question is it possible to
  rationalise the actions of those who were active
  participants in the holocaust, without lessening
  the horrific nature of the holocaust, and
  demeaning those who suffered and died?

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Stylistic Features Language Techniques

• Guilt and the German generation gap
• Schlink explores the Holocaust from an historical
  distance and has as a central character a
  perpetrator instead of a victim.
• Schlink's central idea is how his generation, and
  indeed all generations after the Third Reich,
  have struggled to come to terms with the crimes
  of the Nazis ("the past which brands us and with
  which we must live"). This is played out through
  the trial and the questions that Michael asks.
• Wikipedia 2006

8
Technique Microcosm and Macrocosm

• Macrocosm and microcosm is an ancient Greek
  schema of seeing the same patterns reproduced in
  all levels of the cosmos, from the largest scale
  (macrocosm or universe-level) all the way down to
  the smallest scale (microcosm or sub-sub-atomic
  or even metaphysical-level). (ltwww.wikipedia.orggt
  accessed 01/06/09)
• Hanna and Michael's illegal relationship enacts,
  in microcosm, the relationship of older and
  younger Germans in the postwar years. "My love
  for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my
  generation, a German fate," Michael concludes.
• Implying that there was a love for the older
  generation that sometimes caused guilt to the
  younger members of society because of the older
  generations involvement in the war.
• This is enhanced when Michael hitchhikes to the
  concentration camp site to get what he hopes will
  be some first-hand knowledge. The driver, an
  older man offers an explanation for peoples
  actions.

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Stylistic Features Language Techniques

• Illiteracy as a symbol
• Hannas illiteracy becomes a metaphor for modern
  understanding of the Holocaust. We see everything
  from a distance (2nd hand)
• Hanna, once she attains literacy and understands
  the situation more fully than we can, cannot live
  with herself anymore.
• Hanna is too ashamed to admit she is illiterate
  and allows the blame to be pinned upon her.
• Hanna picks one prisoner to read to her, like
  Michael would later on, only to send that girl to
  the gas chamber. Did she do it to make the last
  months of one almost certain to die a little more
  bearable? Or to keep her secret safe? Michael's
  inability to both condemn and understand springs
  from this.
• Wikipedia 2006

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Stylistic Features Language Techniques

• Schlink therefore asks through Michael
• What should our second generation have done,
  what should it do with the knowledge of the
  horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We
  should not believe we can comprehend the
  incomprehensible, we may not compare the
  incomparable, we may not inquire because to make
  the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the
  horrors an object of discussion, even if the
  horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of
  accepting them as something in the face of which
  we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and
  guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion,
  shame and guilt? To what purpose?

11
Genre Bildungsroman

• German term signifying "novel of formation" or
  "novel of education." The subject of this novel
  is the development of the protagonist's mind and
  character, in the passage from childhood through
  varied experiences and often through a spiritual
  crisis into maturity, which usually involves
  recognition of one's identity and role in the
  world (Abrams). (http//personal.georgiasouthern.e
  du/dougt/terms.htm)
• Schlink employs this genre to explore h the
  coming of age of the narrator, Michael Berg and
  how it affects his relationship with broader
  German society at this time.
• Most German readers would have an understanding
  of the Bildungsroman genre. Michaels personal
  journey and formation is similar to that of
  others in his generation as they come to terms
  with the Nazi legacy.
• Other famous examples of this genre from the
  Western canon are Great Expectations, To Kill A
  Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye and Jane
  Eyre.