![]() ![]() More convincingly, because of her job as a Tram conductor, Hanna is often presented to us in a uniform, which further familiarises and standardises her character.Īdditionally, in both texts, the reader is able to understand the perpetrator more and begin to accept that they are not necessarily the worst kind of people, because unlike characters such as “Uncle Pepi”, a representation of Nazi psychopath Josef Goebbels, who is shown to revel in the mass violence and destruction of the Holocaust, our perpetrators are both shown to have coping mechanisms. A broad-planed, strong, womanly face.” Here Schlink’s lack of spirited or dynamic adjectives convey Hanna’s exterior as rather unremarkable, allowing us to view her as an unextraordinary, conventional human being. Her bare arms were pale…High forehead, high cheekbones, pale blue eyes, full lips that formed a perfect curve without any indentation, square chin. Hanna is described in the novel as follows: “Her shoulder-length, ash-blonde hair was fastened with a clip at the back of her neck. Comparatively, in The Reader, Schlink’s description of Hanna’s exterior makes her seem like a normative every day woman. ![]() This highlights the idea that the perpetrator can be an ordinary person who has become part of the genocidal machine. ![]() More convincingly, the backwards structure of Time’s Arrow emphasises a feeling of lack of control, suggesting that the novel’s protagonist has had to act in such a way. In addition to this, Amis allows his perpetrator to assume many different, normal identities and names throughout the novel, for example “Tod T. This can first be seen when considering the protagonist of Time’s Arrow, a simple doctor, who is described by his own conscience as follows: “I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers.” Here Amis’ use of the adjective “unexceptional” is striking as it subverts the readers natural expectations of what a perpetrator is, someone who is highly exceptional and evil. When first considering the evidence within both texts that shows the authors creating a character that can be understood, in both The Reader and Time’s Arrow, we are given the image of a perpetrator who is an every-day person, not a psychopath, as we would naturally expect. It is first important to establish what exactly a perpetrator is- Raul Hilberg in Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-45 defines the perpetrator as anyone who ‘played a specific role in the formulation or implementation of anti-Jewish measures.’ This is important because of the ethical questions surrounding the representation of the perpetrator within Holocaust literature: “how does one depict the correlative element of the atrocity, that of the perpetration of the suffering?” Erin McGlothlin argues, “…there is a sense that to focus on critically on the perspective of the perpetrator would at best be unseemly and at worst a betrayal of the memory of the victims…”, which is why the ways that both Amis and Schlink construct their perpetrators is so fundamental. I would argue that both authors treat the perpetrators in a very measured manner, meaning that the reader can to a degree understand them and their actions, which in turn help us to learn, but never completely feel sympathy for them. In order to analyse the representation of perpetrators in Holocaust literature, I am going to be looking at Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. ![]()
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