...Gestapo, and the war provided is a rewarding achievement for a lucky Jewish subject. Not for Vladek Spiegelman. In Artie Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel Maus, he uses pictures to describe his father’s journey through the Holocaust. Vladek loses almost everything he loves his business, home, and most of his family. This tests his character throughout the story and ultimately results him being bitter towards life after. However the Holocaust forces Vladek to rely on inanimate objects to get him through this time. He confuses people and things as a sense of coinage. In the story Maus, Vladek’s ordeal through the holocaust complicates his connection towards currency, and this consequently alters his relationships with Mala and Artie. Vladek’s relationship towards currency begins as a love story. Vladek is first attracted to Anja because of her wealth. The bottom of page twenty shows them at the park and the dialogue is an invite to dinner at her parents house. After the invite Vladek narrates that “The Zylberberg family was very well off- millionaires! (Spiegelman 20).” This panel shows his eyes in a very pleased manner as if he made the right decision in choosing a woman. It is the panels on the next page where he is assesses his wife to be. He comes in and the family welcomes him like he is royalty and then begins to poke around Anja’s personal belongings. By doing these acts Vladek sees woman in his life as a perception of currency. The old fling he leaves behind, Lucia...
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...Julia touched on resourcefulness of Vladek, and this continues through chapter 10. In the beginning of the chapter, Vladek (extremely old, weak, and sick) asks Art to help him install storm winds to save a little money on heat. Throughout the chapter, as Vladek continues with the story, he pesters his son about them. This shows that his frugal tendencies are constantly in the back of his mind. In chapter 9, Julia discusses his unwasteful tendencies when Vladek attempts to force Art to finish food. Art tells his father not to push himself, or else he may have another heart attack (which will be much more expensive than heating). Art sometimes needs to act like a father to his father. When he was a young man, there is an example of protective instincts over material goods. On the train from Dachau, he stays up most of the night protecting his Red Cross box from other...
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...two main characters is an interesting adventure. The father, Vladek, is a survivor of a tragic 19th century event, the Holocaust. The holocaust has a negative effect on the way Vladek carries himself. Vladeks son, Artie, is getting told the story of the holocaust from a survivors point of view, Vladek is a survivor. Artie is writing a graphic book on the horrific story his father is proposing. Throughout the story, father and son have many disagreements, and certainly an entertaining love and hate relationship. One prime way the holocaust affected Vladek is the lack of trust he has with people. When Artie was a child, he was having problems with some kids at school, whom he referred to as his “friends”. Vladek assured him, “friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room for a week, then you will see what it is, friends!” (Spiegelman, 6). Artie must have had a rough time growing up with Vladek because his lack of trust, and also his compulsiveness of neatness or organization. Vladek constantly needs to keep all of his tasks in extremely precise order. Sometimes his compulsiveness provoke arguments and disagreements. Besides Vladeks thrive for organization, Artie and Vladek disagree on many events, often causing irritable situations. Vladek still treats Artie as if he is a child. He tries to influence the way he dresses by throwing out his coat, and giving him one that he prefers to wear. Vladek says to Artie, "such an old shabby coat. It's a shame my son...
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...In Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman presents not only his father’s Holocaust narrative but also his own personal narrative, especially with regards to his relationship with Vladek. Readers learn that Artie and Vladek do not always get along, and there is a palpable tension between them. Vladek seems frugal and argumentative, while Artie appears self-centered and uncaring. In both cases, the characters’ faults are not glossed over. They are portrayed realistically, with positive and negative traits on full display. These portrayals accomplish two different goals for Spiegelman: one, they emphasize Artie’s interest in accuracy as opposed to sentimentality, and two, they allow the audience to discover Artie’s own personal trauma—namely,...
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...been through. Vladek survival of the holocaust has a lot to do with his own resourcefulness and actions, these helped him through the horrors of the war and now are part of him, his reluctance to waste anything is a testament to this. Vladek's constant insistence of having Art staying with may be due to a fear of losing more people close to him. Not all of Valdek's personality arose from the holocaust. We can see glimpses if his former self from what he does. Vladek's personality is heavily influenced by his sufferings in the holocaust, carrying much of what it took to survive in the holocaust into a peaceful society where such skill were no longer needed. Suffering much more than most people he feels that suffering of others do not compare to his as his, such as the time where he scoffed at Art's friends. During the holocaust food was scarce, to survive one must save everything he has and waste nothing, Vladek did so during the holocaust but also seems to do just as much "Ever since Hitler [he] [doesn't] want to waste a crumb", much to the annoyance of everyone around him. Much of the survival of Vladek and Anja was due to his own actions and skill. He had trust in his own ability which helped him and Anja survive the war. After the war he continued to have faith in his own ability and wants to do most of the maintenance of the house by himself, such as fixing the roof, as well as counting his money and pills. "such things [he could] do [himself]" Vladek has been through...
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...I am going to write about the life of Vladek. I will show what his life was like before the war, how he changed as he experienced war. In the first chapter he finds himself in a strange relationship with Lucia Greenberg. He doesn’t really seem to have any interest for her, but yet stays with her for three or four years (15-17). This shows that he doesn’t really like to be alone but is still confident that things were always going to work out. He moved on to meet Anja, they had a really strong relationship and Vladek really took good care of her. They had a son, which caused a lot of stress on Anja and she became depressed (33). He then receives a letter from the government about the draft for the Polish Reserves. The fact of being drafted...
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...was the son in the family who wrote about his father’s experience in the Holocaust. Maus I and Maus II are his two works of art that share historical information and his personal struggle. Within Maus II, Art talks about the start of his father’s struggles and what will be the beginning of a life changing event. The Holocaust affected victims just as the American Great Depression did its victims. This chapter starts out with Vladek continuously counting his pills, and then Artie and Francoise are staying with him just for a little since Mala left. Vladek keeps everything; he doesn’t want to get rid of anything, even crumbs. In chapter three, page 78 of Maus II, he is trying to give Artie a piece of fruitcake, and Artie refuses, and says he isn’t hungry. Vladek then tells Artie, “So, fine. I can pack the fruitcake in with the cereal for you to take home,” then Artie refuses to let Vladek give him the food because he doesn’t want it. Vladek then says, “I cannot forget it…ever since Hitler I don’t like to throw out even a crumb.” This shows that Vladek is still afraid to get rid of anything, because he is still in fear of the past. They begin talking more about Auschwitz, and how in 1944, some prisoners revolted and they killed three S.S men and blew up the crematorium and for this they all got killed. The girls who snuck over to the ammunitions got hanged as well. This was the end of Auschwitz. The Gestapo then came and here is where the death march came about. The death march...
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...Vladek wore appropriate non-Jewish clothing, representing that he lived under Polish culture, while Anja still wore Jewish clothes, symbolizing her more traditional Jewish cultural behaviors. Vladek’s pig mask assists him in obtaining food from a “black market” vendor in Poland (Spiegleman, 138). Even though Vladek dons the pig mask, he still needs to venture out in the dark of the night for the simple action of acquiring food, which shows the disguises fail to work as efficiently in a setting with more light and clarity. Before he attains the food, Vladek runs into another Jew also concealed by a pig mask, and this Jew had been hiding for over a year (Spiegleman, 138). When the fellow Jew in the pig mask comes across Vladek, he seems a little surprised to encounter Vladek, which shows that even though he succeeds at hiding from the malicious Nazi’s, his contact with other Jews has been limited. Vladek camouflages himself with the pig mask to sneak onto a train in plain sight, and he chooses a German car over a Polish car, for “in the Polish car they could smell if a Polish Jew came in” (Spiegleman,...
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...Your Title Your name Institution Date (optional). GUILT is an emotion one gets when he/she believes or discovers that he/she did a wrong deed and valuated his/her standard social, moral or penal code ( Chaplin, 1975). The intensity of guilt varies from one person to another. When some individuals survive a horrific event, they get this overwhelming feeling of guilt and blame themselves for surviving the abominable situation that others did not survive. This state of mind is a mental condition and is sometimes termed as imagined guilt. It may be found in survivors of holocausts, natural disasters, mass murder and pandemics e.g. the 9/11 Oklahoma City bombings. While this guilt might not be experienced by everyone, it a research based phenomenon and has been proved to be real. The expression and amount of guilt varies from individual to individual. This condition was grouped as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, 2000). The survivors may or may not be consciously aware that they are feeling guilty. The holocaust was the carnage that took place where the Nazi, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, killed over six million Jews. Most of the Jews who survived suffered post-traumatic stress disorders. Symptoms include reverent memories of the traumatic event that took place, flashbacks of the event, physical and emotional stress due to something that is a reminder of the event and horrific dreams about the event. When...
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...the tale of his father Vladek who is a survivor of the Holocaust. Throughout the novels, Art makes references or portrays within the comic how this has affected himself in one way or another. By constructing the panels in a way that shows how one event is connected to or lead to the other: the text demonstrates that Art has experienced some psychological scarring from the Holocaust as a second generation survivor. In a broader statement, the Holocaust has had a psychological and cultural effect on its survivors. In a television interview titled, “The Holocaust through the Eyes of a Maus” with Art Speigelman: Art states that the purpose of this graphic novel was to recite his father’s story as a survivor of the Holocaust. Art mentions that Maus is about the past and the present intertwining irrevocably and permanently. One of Art’s intentions were to gain a relationship with his father. Through this process of coaching Vladek, trying to collect information about the events that occurred he gained a relationship as interviewer/interviewee. Multiple situations throughout the novels Maus I and Maus II, Art indicates that the Holocaust has been the primary reason why they have this distant relationship. For example, when Arts friends left him when he was a child and he cried to Vladek. His response to him was telling him that, if you lock them together in a room with no food for a week that he would see what friends were (Maus I pg 6). The fact that Vladek is saying this to an 11...
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...Often times when reading novels based off of true events, the reader is inclined to interpret what the narrator says to be true. In Art Spiegelman’s Maus, neither Artie nor Vladek could be considered reliable narrators due to Artie being the author of the book thus being able to edit his book however he saw fit, and Vladek is unreliable because his recollection of the Holocaust has a large bias since he only encountered one side of the Holocaust and his memories could be skewed by his age. Artie is not a reliable narrator because he is both the author and narrator and because he has allowed his relationship to his father to bias his perspective. Art Spiegelman chose to show his relationship with his father in the book. “Simultaneously it is a sharp study of the tension that exists between father and son, and the story of the writing of the book itself” (Grossman “Maus…”). Due to him being the author and editor of the book, one cannot trust Artie because he could have edited anything he wanted in order to portray the tension between him and his father in a different light than what it really was. Throughout the novel, Art and Vladek have intense arguments, the most passionate being the final one where Art leaves his father, calling him “Murderer” (159). When taken out of context, it seems a bit extreme for Art to call his father a murderer. But, the way Art wrote about his mother and included the very personal strip that he wrote about her, makes the reader feel for his side...
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...What it takes to survive a war “Maus” is graphic novel that tells the story of some survivors of the Holocaust, written by Art Spiegelman. It revolves around the main character Vladek (Art’s father) and his journey starting from years before World War II throughout the war and finally the end of the war and his survival. As a Jewish man, Vladek’s survival through the war and the Nazi concentration camps was genuinely a tough and difficult trip. Not only he survived, but Vladek also managed to carry his family away from the face of death. Quite a few factors contributed to his success, some are physical; such as his various skills and abilities that he used to keep himself alive, while the rest are emotional; like his love to his family, his dedication and his resourcefulness. Vladek was a true handyman, he possessed lots of skills before the war which later turned out to be his boat to the shore of life. He started out in the textile business, where it was more management work than hard labor. Later after Anja fell into a state of depression and he was coming back from the sanitarium, he enlisted into the Polish army, where he learned survival and combat skills that would help him in the long run. He was taken as a prisoner soon enough after the war starts, however, he got released. Vladek got into the black market business, dealing in the black market taught him a lot of skills varying from negotiation and communication skills to life lessons such as not trusting everyone...
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...Ahmed Hassan English 11 Introduction: Hook: Deprived of food, sleep and family? Maus by Art Spiegelman is a graphic novel, that takes the reader on a journey through the holocaust and WWII with Vladek Spiegelman, the Father of Art Spiegelman. Context: Vladek was separated from his wife and was just recently placed in Auschwitz. He was working as a tinman. Vladek is working at the Auschwitz tin shop, though he has never been trained in this profession. During this time, Anja is at Birkenau, a larger camp two miles to the south. Whereas Auschwitz is a camp for workers, Birkenau is just a waiting area for the gas chambers and crematoriums. Thesis: Spiegelman uses Perspective, Imagery and contrast to emphasize what Victimized people go through. Body Paragraph 1 P: Contrast is pivotal in Graphic novels it helps add emphasis to drawings and naturally gives more meaning to many different aspects. Contrast is used a lot in the E: The middle 2 panels. E: Through the use of shading the black background is contrasted to the white characters in the foreground. The black colour is dark and scary and there is a lot of it in this page, it highlights what the Jews were faced with. The pure white Colour of the jews in the foreground highlights the innocence of the Prisoners. This has a positive effect on the reader. By Contrasting the jews and Nazi’s it helps the reader understand the main Character and the plot of the story more. L: This links to the theme...
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...characters of his book as mice, cats, pig etc.? 3. Maus 4. What was Vladek like? 5. Vladek is an older person with a very précised in what he want and he son see this as being annoying. He feels you need to be aware of everything. He does not trust people specially his second wife Mala. He has hearth problems and he is diabetic. Sometime he used his sickness to his advantage. 6. During the Holocaust, he exhibited a spectacular resourcefulness, work ethic, and presence of mind that often enabled him to secure food, shelter, and safety for himself and his family. He was a shrewd businessman, and in the most troubling times he saved everything of use. In 1978, he still saves everything and tries to exchange those things that he no longer needs. Once so resourceful and competent, he is still constantly working on small projects, some of which he is incapable of completing. Vladek's personality is largely dominated by his Holocaust experiences. 7. What do we know of his life before the holocaust? 8. He was a happy bachelor living his life in the small city of Czestochowa. He used to sell textiles. Vladek was organized person his apartment was small but organized. He met Anja and soon he felt in love with her. When Anja take him to her house to meet her parent, he checks her clothes to see what kind of wife she will be. To his surprise she was organized like him. 9. Vladek marries Art's mother, Anja, in Poland in 1937, only two years before the Nazi...
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...amount of similar storylines, Spiegelman’s creativity with the normal elements of comics has won him high praise. This analysis will focus on Spiegelman’s unique twist on icons, layouts, diegesis, abstraction, and encapsulation as displayed by Maus. Icons are pictures that are used to embody a person, place, thing, or idea. McCloud hammers this concept home by drawing random things, such as a cow (McCloud, pg. 26), but reminds the reader that it is technically not a real cow. It is just an image. In Maus, Spiegelman’s characters are icons; he utilizes everyday, commonplace animals to represent the humans in the plot. The type of animal portrayed is dependent on the nationality of the human being resembled. The Jewish characters, such as Vladek and Art, are depicted as mice (pg.11, top left panel), the Polish are drawn as pigs (pg.28, bottom panel), the Germans are cats (pg. 33), and the Americans are dogs (pg. 125, bottom right). These animalistic icons aid the reader in clearly distinguishing between the different groups of character, establishing a prevalent a motif of predator vs. prey, as well as revealing common traits of each group. Abstraction is the process of breaking down an image to a more simple form, allowing the viewer to focus on specific details. Spiegelman strategically uses abstraction in his style when drawing his characters. In Maus, this abstraction makes the gruesome subject matter more bearable to read and view. If Spiegelman included realistic depictions...
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