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Part 1, Chapter 14
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Reader, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt, Responsibility, and the Holocaust
Secrets, Indifference, and Emotional Distance
Generational and Parent-Child Conflict
Reading and Illiteracy
The Image as Memory and the Gaze
Summary
Analysis
Around this time, Michael begins to “betray” Hanna by keeping her secret from his friends. Michael, Sophie, and their friend Holger often go to the pool together, but Michael finds himself unable to talk about Hanna with them. Sophie asks Michael if his disappearances to spend time with Hanna have something to do with the hepatitis he had come down with earlier. Michael tells her that he is no longer sick, but is still unwilling to talk to her about Hanna. He offers to tell her another time, but that time never comes.
Just as Michael’s illness magnified his guilty desire into a “labyrinth,” now Michael treats his desire for Hanna as an illness by covering it up. Whereas Michael once felt guilty for desiring Hanna, now he feels guilty for keeping her a secret and thus for disavowing her. His secrecy about Hanna forms a wedge between himself and his friends, just as it did with his family.
Themes
