Weekly Conclusions

This week I finished reading both parts of the book "Maus". The graphic novel was definitely an eye-opener for me. Reading it really made me realize how traumatic it must've been for survivors to tell their stories and how no one will ever truly understand what they felt like other than the survivors themselves. As I read the book, I understood that the book was so much more than just a comic, it was a narrative of a person during and their life during, before, and after the Holocaust. One of the things I really liked about the story is the juxtaposition of cats as Germans and the mice as Jews and the euphemistic approach attached to it. But after understanding why Art Spiegelman chose to use cats and mice as an extended metaphor it made me sympathize so much more for those who survived and to what extent they had to go to survive. Spiegelman shows the absurdity and brutality of the Holocaust by portraying people as animals. And after analyzing the book in class and how V...

Last week in class we read and discussed a piece “Show and Tell” and how graphic novels can have well detailed illustrations to deepen our understanding. To apply this concept we read  “Maus” by Art Spiegelman. After reading “Maus” in class and analyzing the story I understood that there's so much more than what meets the eye when it comes to comics. “Maus” is a comic that tells a story about the Holocaust using extended metaphors with animals and how they symbolize different groups of people. The graphic novel represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, etcetera.  As depicted in the comic, art is interviewing his father for a new comic about the experiences of his father during the holocaust. Over the course of all the interviews, art incorporates a flash back to a comic he had written after his mothers death about how she committed suicide. The illustrations show a gloomy atmosphere as he discovers his father, Vladek is crying on the floor over his wife Anjas de...