"I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her” (Meagan Adler)

Overall, I was analytically captivated by the internal conflict that Michael is confronted with throughout The Reader.  I was particularly intrigued by the part of the reading where Michael says, “I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators” (pg.171);  at this part, the age barrier between Hanna and Michael took on a new level of significance for me.  In loving Hanna, Michael gradually became a part of the older generation that allowed the haunting past to occur.  Reflecting on his past he expresses, “All the same, it would have been good for me back then to be able to feel I was part of my generation” (pg.171).  Michael wishes that he could be part of his own generation so he, himself, would not feel the guilt of his past.  He feels guilty for loving someone that facilitated such evil acts, as he says, “I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me.  I had loved her” (pg.170) . 

Another part of the reading that I was particularly interested in is that when Michael says,  “My own diagnosis is that the numbness had to overwhelm my body before it would let go of me, before I could let go of it” (pg.168).  Here, we see further into the internal conflict that defines Michael throughout the entirety of the novel.  He cannot completely step away from the memories of his past and therefore will never be able to be fully defined by a “numbness” that makes him distant from his past because he loved and will always have an inevitable love for Hanna.  At the end of the novel, when Michael sends Hanna tapes of him reading to Hanna in prison, we see that he cares about her and still loves her.  He is proud of her when she writes back because he feels a connection to her that he can never forget.  Furthermore, he tries to hold back his tears at the end of the novel when he finds out about her suicide because he learns more about her and how his tapes taught her how to read.  At this moment, I feel like Michael sees that Hanna had a mutual love for him, which makes her suicide significantly tragic.  I think that it is through Michael’s reflection on his past that we are able to see how we are shaped by what has happened in our lives building up to the present.  He expresses, “The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive” (pg.217).