Webster's dictionary defines the word relationship as the connections between or among other people. Life is filled with relationships, whether it is our family, our friends, and maybe one special love. They play an important role in determining one's character. The relationships that are personally invited, friends and lovers, are more essential, because one chooses them to be a part of their life. Michael and Hanna's kinship was of choice, he chose to keep going back to her, and she chose to let him in every time. The relationship Michael had with Hanna in his adolescence shaped his character and turned him into an adult numb to the world. Hanna made him this way because she, as an adult was numb to the world. Hanna had become numb because of her relationships she had, especially with the young Jewish girls who read to her. Michael notices Hanna's numbness for the first time as he observes her in her apartment:
             It was almost as if she had withdrawn into her own body
             and left it to itself and it's own quiet rhythms, unbothered by any input from her mind, oblivious to the outside world. (The Reader 16)
             Gradually, without knowing, the numbness took over Michael's body, which in return, restricted his relationships in his life. Hanna passed on the numbness to Michael like a disease, where Michael's cure was Hanna, and Hanna's cure was to deal with her past as an illiterate Nazi.
             To completely understand the idea of Hanna's passing on the numbness to Michael, which led to the demise of every relationship he had encountered after Hanna, one must find out what numbness is. Numbness is defined when Michael describes the courtroom from his own account after watching the trial, and observing the people involved, day in and day out:
             It was like being a prisoner in the death camps who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objec...