Michael is the novel's moral center and its moral failure. At fifteen, he is drawn into an affair he cannot understand; at twenty-four, he discovers a truth he cannot act on; for the rest of his life, he is paralyzed by the gap between knowledge and action. He represents the second generation of postwar Germans — people who inherited guilt they did not earn and could not discharge. His emotional numbness is not coldness but damage: the affair and the trial broke something in him that never healed. He is the reader of the title in every sense — he reads to Hanna, he reads her trial, he reads her life, but reading is always his substitute for acting.