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The Reader

The Reader. Reading, Literacy, Narrative. Significance of the title. The reader is Michael, reading to Hanna and the texts and manner of reading chart their relationship over time The reader is Michael, as a fifteen year old, reading Hanna and her body

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The Reader

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  1. The Reader Reading, Literacy, Narrative

  2. Significance of the title • The reader is Michael, reading to Hanna and the texts and manner of reading chart their relationship over time • The reader is Michael, as a fifteen year old, reading Hanna and her body • The reader is Michael, as an adult, reading and narrating the past in order to make sense of it and be free of it • The reader is you, reading the subtexts, picking up the clues, being aware of the allegory, piecing together the threads of the narrative • The reader is Hanna, learning to read to understand herself, her guilt, her time

  3. Reading • The narrative voice is reticent - we have to read between the lines • Hanna´s illiteracy also rendered her ignorant • You have to re-read the book to fully understand it • The text is a multi/layered narrative and the texts within texts serve to comment on and exemplify the central themes and motifs of The Reader:

  4. Intertextuality: • The Odyssey: probably written near the end of the eighth century BC, The poem is, in part, a sequel to Homer's Iliad and mainly centers on the Greek hero Odysseus and his long journey home to Ithaca following the fall of Troy. • The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon and is indeed the second—the Iliad is the first—extant work of Western literature.

  5. Intertextuality: • Other texts such as Love and Intrigues, reflect Michael and Hanna`s relationship • When Michael goes to Hanna`s prison cell after her death he finds survivor literature • Reading literature has the power to transform one and provides a moral education

  6. Literacy • Hanna’s illiteracy works on an allegorical level to suggest the moral and cultural illiteracy of the war generation • Her shame about illiteracy seems to lead her to say that she wrote the report covering up what happened on the march – p128 • Michael comes to no definite conclusions about why she should hide her illiteracy – p132

  7. Narrative: • The novel has a number of narrative threads that are woven together: Love story, allegory, bildungsroman, detective genre • The novel has an overall linear structure but there are shifts in anrrative time and perspective • Key motifs such as sickness and journeying provide narrative unity

  8. Narrative • There are many different stories in addition to the one I have written – • At first I wanted to write our story to be free of it…Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing…and it came back, detail by detail p 215

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