MB UNIUD

In my opinion the film "The Reader" is a mix of Literaly movement. The story is explained through the protagonist Michael point of view but we can understand that the structure of film adopts many postmodern features. For example we find intertextuality between stories and many Literaly quotations. The chronology of story is arranged through the use of flashbacks and so the viewer can build the events in a better way.  In my opinion the plot of "The Reader " is the research of experience by the protagonist Michael. So he is a young guy who wants to make experience in order to grow up and to became a man. We can connect this plot with Ulysses by Joyce, as a matter of fact Michael represents the Postmodern man, like Leopold Bloom represents the Modern man. Ulysses by Joyce is an anthropologic summa and in my opinion the film "The Reader" recovers some aspects of it in order to talk of the Shoà. The many quotations in the film supports this plot, the lessons by teacher on Goethe, the quotation of Orazio, Emilia Garotti by Lessing, Odyssey by Homer, Lady Chatterley by Lawrence and Jaspers, the questions on the Shoà in Germany. We can divide the film into two parts: the youngness of Michael, and the maturity of Michael. In the first part of the story we can find another interesting aspects of Ulysses by Joyce: the question of carnality than conventions in society. Michael and Anna don't think to their age but they wants to make experience and so they make sex very frequently against the traditional conventions. Michael is a young boy paralyzed from his family but he takes up power from Anna in order to believe in himself. So we can find three different connections with Literaly: the Michael paralyses is connected with Eveline paralyses by Joyce where Eveline was tread on her jobs, the function of Anna to give up power to Michael as Mrs. Dalloway and her husband in Virginia Woolf, and finally the objective by Michael to reach his essence in order to became a man, like Ulysses by Tennyson. In the second part of the film the viewer can focalize his attention on the question of Shoà. Anna abandons Michael but he meets again her during the Nazi process. During this time Michael have the possibility to reflect on his life and on the essence of life, and so he revises the past in order to create something in the present and we can connect this way act to the Eliot method to create poetry. The final reflection of this film is on the dead. Anna says: "the dead are died" and we can link this sentence with The Dead by Joyce, where the protagonist Gabriel reflects on the importance of death in our life. At the end Anna kill herself, and Michael takes his daughter on Anna's tomb in order to talk of his story and so to restart from there in order to became a new life.