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