“The dead can call you to account”

“The dead can call you to account” is Hanna’s explanation of why the dead, unlike people who claim not to understand her, can hold her responsible. Spoken in prison during a conversation with Michael, the phrase turns her recurring encounters with the dead into an accusation that neither the court nor Michael’s partial attention can settle.

The phrase and its context

Hanna begins from a feeling that no one had understood who she was or what made her act. In her account, being misunderstood has meant being beyond judgment: if no one understands, no one can call her to account. She extends that failure of recognition to the court, saying that even it could not truly hold her responsible.

The dead occupy a different position. Hanna says they understand, whether or not they were present, and that those who were there understand all the more. Her words do not absolve her; they shift the source of judgment from institutions and the living to those whose suffering cannot be answered away by claims of incomprehension.

Prison and the return of the dead

Hanna describes the dead as coming to her every night in prison, whether she wants them to or not. Before the trial, she says, she could still chase them away when they came. The contrast marks a change in her relation to the past: what had once been kept at bay now returns persistently, and prison becomes the setting in which she can no longer exclude its presence.

The phrase therefore joins accountability to memory rather than to a single courtroom verdict. Hanna’s image of the dead as witnesses gives her nightly experience an ethical force, but the passage does not explain it as a supernatural event or reduce it to a formal judgment. It presents the dead’s presence as Hanna’s way of describing a reckoning that continues beyond the trial.

Michael’s response and the niche

Michael cannot think of an answer. He initially wants to say that he cannot chase anyone away, then recognizes that this is untrue: someone can be chased away by being set in a niche. His realization turns Hanna’s metaphor into a judgment on his own conduct. He had admired her for learning to read and for writing him letters, but he had not answered, visited, or spoken with her; he had kept her in a limited place in his life rather than making room for her as a person.

The conversation thus places Michael’s emotional distance beside Hanna’s account of evasion. His niche is not equivalent to the court’s failure or Hanna’s treatment of the dead, but the image exposes a shared mechanism: a person can be kept at a distance by being assigned a manageable place instead of being faced in the claims they make. The phrase’s force lies in refusing that containment. The dead remain beyond Michael’s niche, and Hanna says they can still call the living to account.