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4.1.1 Beautiful
Hanna is the second and round characters in the story described by Michael who becomes both as the main character and narrator. Murphy 1972:
276 explains that one of the nine ways to identify a character’s personality is through personal description. Schlink describes Hanna as a middle aged woman
around thirty-six years old at the beginning of the story, has a beautiful face and a fine figure. Hanna’s beauty is shown in her physical appearance. She has a
womanly face, high forehead, high cheekbones, pale blue eyes, full lips, and square chin. Hanna’s physical appearance and beauty attract Michael Berg; a
fifteen year old boy. Michael cannot stop thinking about her in all the way Hanna held, moved, and dressed herself.
“Her shoulder-length, ash-blond hair was fastened with a clip at the back of her neck. Her bare arms were pale. Her face as it was then has been
overlaid in my memory by the faces she had later. If I see her in my mind’s eye as she was then, she doesn’t have a face at all, and I have to
reconstruct it. High forehead, high cheekbones, pale blue eyes, full lips that formed a perfect curve without any indentation, square chin. A broad-
planed, strong, womanly face. I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture its beauty. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her neck and
shoulders, her breasts, which the slip veiled rather than concealed, her lips which stretched the slip tight as she dropped her foot on her knee and then
set it on the chair, her leg, pale, naked, than shimmering in the silky stocking” p. 12 - 14.
Another way to identified character’s personality according to Murphy 1972: 276 is through other character’s eyes and opinions. Hanna’s characteristics is
seen by Michael as the narrator in the story. Hanna is sexy and very feminine that is different from other women that Michael met in his life.
“Why had I not been able to take my eyes off her? She had a very strong, feminine body; more voluptuous than the girls I liked and watched. I
hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her was not just her body, but the way
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she held herself and moved. She was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive – a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but
was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body” p. 15 - 16.
Michael is falling in love with Hanna. Even though, it is prohibited and shameful that he is falling in love with an older woman but cannot put away that special
feeling for Hanna. “The next night I fell in love with her. I could barely sleep, I was yearning
for her, I dreamed of her, thought I could feel her until I realized that I was clutching the pillow or the blanket. My mouth hurt for kissing. I kept
getting erections, but I didn’t want to masturbate. I wanted to be with her” p. 27.
4.1.2 Kind and Caring
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