Maus 2
There is an old saying that a picture says a thousand words. Art Spiegelman's series Maus: A Survivors Tale proves this saying to a tee. Added to the dialogue, a million possibilities arise. The series is a biographical comic book about his father's experiences during the Holocaust. It uses cats, mice, and other animals to present this very delicate subject. The first book in the series received tremendous adulation and received the National Book Critics Circle prize in biography. However, the critics involved in this prize were forced to ask two questions. 'Does a comic book represent the World Wars well or not?' and 'Was Spiegelman right to use the humor of a comic book to express the Holocaust?' I will attempt to answer these questions by focusing on Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began.Using artwork combined with pictures serves many purposes. It allows the author to develop characters with a visual reference. It serves to fill in the blanks by cutting down the necessity to read between the lines to understand the big picture. These can be seen as pros and cons. So Spiegelman attempted to reduce the gap between the dialogue and the pictures. I didn't want people to get too interested in the drawings. I wa
This literary medium did let him show the Holocaust as he best as he could. As well as eliminating this disparity, the drawings can be used to accentuate ideas that Spiegelman has tries to express. To help him with keeping the focus off the drawings, you can notice an extreme uniformity in the drawings. If too much emphasis were put on the pictures, then whole story would not be shown. Hitler once said, "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human. People might not like the idea of making a comic strip out of the racism towards the Jewish population and the horror that their people have gone through. The author uses the uniformity in the pictures to eliminate the over descriptive nature of pictures. Spiegelman says in the quote that he doesn't want people to focus on the artwork, he just uses them to help the story along. I do not believe that Spiegelman was right in using humor during this book, but I do believe that it added to the enjoyable readability of the book. There are pictures in Maus II that can be described as simple disturbing, but show the atrocities of the Holocaust well. To decide whether Spiegelman has correctly shown the Holocaust and the atrocities associated with it, you must weigh the above arguments. An example of Spiegelman's use of humor to show the Holocaust in lighter way is on page 78. You simply could not express the horror experienced by the unfortunate humans that were forced to go through this by using words to describe it. This shows how Spiegelman used the analogy to express the stratification that was present during this period of time.
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Acceptance Essays
