The Reader: Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Four years after Michael starts sending Hanna the tapes, Hanna sends him a hand-written note thanking him. The handwriting looks like child’s writing, but Michael is overjoyed that Hanna can finally read and write. In the past few years, Michael had read about illiteracy, the helplessness that it inflicts on people’s lives, and the energy it costs them to hide it. Though Michael is proud that Hanna has taken “a step towards liberation,” he also feels sorry for her, for having a “delayed and failed life.”

After Hanna’s first note, she regularly sends him brief notes thanking him, commenting on the book Michael read to her, or describing her life in prison. Though she assumes all the books Michael records are contemporary, Hanna’s literary observations are “astonishingly on the mark.” Despite Hanna’s many notes, Michael never writes to Hanna but keeps reading to her, even when he is in America or on vacation. Reading to Hanna is Michael’s “way of speaking to her, with her.” Michael keeps all of her notes, observing that over the years her handwriting became “lighter and more confident.”