Post Three (Gioia Kelleher)

A lot of The Read is an observation and an analysis on how we deal with our past and how we let it affect and change us in the present. This idea more than anything is seen in Michael, whose entire life after Hanna is ruled by his expectance with her. He says that he goes “numb” after his relationship with Hanna. He distances himself from the people he knew so he could avoid being reminded of his experience and he distances from those later in his life because of his fear of again experiencing what he experienced with Hanna. Through out the novel Michael compares the trauma he experienced with Hanna to what those in the concentration camps during Hitler’s reign and World War Two experienced (which I found absolutely ridiculous). The Reader is also about how our perception our past or really our memories change over time. It is hard for most of us to not let our memories become clouded by what Michael describes as our “imaginations” and what I interpreted as our perception. This observation reminded me of many of the arguments made in The Sense of an Ending, but Bernhard Schlink I think builds upon this idea more than Julian Barnes. Schlink writes that our collective memories of a part of time in history, such as the Holocaust, “flash on the mind again and again, until they freeze into clichés” (144). I have always felt that the word “cliché” has a negative connotation because they never actually represent reality and that they instead represent the way we want to perceive reality. I believe that Schlink during Hanna’s trial observes how the lack of information and understanding of what really was occurring in concentration camps and the activities surrounding them got in the way of a just and accurate trail. I feel that this happens a lot when debating the past.