After Thoughts About Maus
After reading the Maus again, I have new thoughts in mind. I have read Maus back in high school. When I was reading the book back then, I did not like it. It is a comic talking about the German holocaust-- presenting a cruel story only using such a "simple" medium. I believed the horrible and terrible things happened in that part of the world at that time, should have been presented with something that is more "complex" and more "matured". However, I changed my mind as I read Maus the second time. Spiegelman talks about his dad's (Vladek)story during the Holocaust. How has he "lived" through and how could he be alive.
He used rats to symbolizing Jewish, used cats to symbolizing German, pigs as Poles, frog as French, and dogs as American. I believe these are a really good symbolization of the condition at that time. Predator and prey, cat hunts the mice, and German kill the Jewish. It is very effective for people to understand the idea, and that is one of the advantages of the book.
There is another advantage of this book, art presents whatever he wants. Since the comic is a simple medium, Art can easily present not only any picture but any idea he wants too. One might say the entire book is mostly about the cruelness of the Holocaust, and I don't disagree. But there is a greater problem in the book: people who been through the Holocaust did not want to talk about their experience and the experience "consumes" them in some way. The relationship between Art and Vladek, which the relationship between a person who been through the Holocaust and the son of that person. Art as a child of one of those people wants to tell the story to his and later generation. Which he needs to know exactly what happened and to present what exactly happen. He has to go through the process of communicating a person who had been terribly scarred by his experience, which to see it in a bigger view, the children of the Holocaust survivors trying to communicate with them. He showed that in the comic-- how hard is it to make Vladek talk about his experience.
He used rats to symbolizing Jewish, used cats to symbolizing German, pigs as Poles, frog as French, and dogs as American. I believe these are a really good symbolization of the condition at that time. Predator and prey, cat hunts the mice, and German kill the Jewish. It is very effective for people to understand the idea, and that is one of the advantages of the book.
There is another advantage of this book, art presents whatever he wants. Since the comic is a simple medium, Art can easily present not only any picture but any idea he wants too. One might say the entire book is mostly about the cruelness of the Holocaust, and I don't disagree. But there is a greater problem in the book: people who been through the Holocaust did not want to talk about their experience and the experience "consumes" them in some way. The relationship between Art and Vladek, which the relationship between a person who been through the Holocaust and the son of that person. Art as a child of one of those people wants to tell the story to his and later generation. Which he needs to know exactly what happened and to present what exactly happen. He has to go through the process of communicating a person who had been terribly scarred by his experience, which to see it in a bigger view, the children of the Holocaust survivors trying to communicate with them. He showed that in the comic-- how hard is it to make Vladek talk about his experience.
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