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A Survivor's Tale By Art Spiegelm Literary Analysis

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Art Spiegelman’s Maus II “A Survivor’s Tale,” is a well-known graphic novel that depicted the holocaust. Rewriting a story about the holocaust in the form of a graphic novel or comic as some might describe it, probably seemed unusual and childish. Comics and graphic novels were seen as lacking that education equivalent that people would refer to when researching or reading about that specific point in history. Having a large amount of books relating to the holocaust over the years has only made it repetitive because we are aware of Auschwitz and its terrible events. Art Spiegelman did a fantastic job in retelling the story of his father’s survival in Auschwitz. He also shows the reader his unique relationship with his father. Maus not only …show more content…

Miller also stated that “Spiegelman realized that everything is a representation.” In Maus II the plot is written as a story within a story, and it is not only about what occurred in the holocaust, but Art’s interpretation about writing his story about the holocaust. Spiegelman had a goal, to let the readers know that while writing his novel, there was no way he could fully show the audience the true essence of what took place back then. It was his attempt to try to represent the unrepresentable. Art describes his distress and guilt in writing Maus II. Pages 41-46 we see him wearing a mouse mask. I believe this symbolizes the incapacity he sensed creating the novel. On page 42 we see the reporters hounding Art about his new graphic novel. “Tell our viewers what message you want them to get from your book” (42). He is unable to distinguish his book with a viewer’s message, nonetheless it shows the reader that Spiegelman is not able to explain the personal accounts of the holocaust and the several complexities that went on. On page 41 we see one of the novel’s most powerful images, Spiegelman sitting at his desk depressed, balanced on top of a pile of dead, skeleton-like Jews, with also a picture of the guard tower on the top right. The same imagine is shown on page 43 while walking the streets with the bodies on the floor. I believe that Spiegelman used these images in this novel to represent that haunting effect that the holocaust still has on him and the reminder of the effects of the past have on the present. Even though he did not live through the holocaust himself, these memories are a part of his everyday life. These feelings seem

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The Holocaust was an absolutely devastating time period, killing over 6 million innocent Jewish people. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel lived through the tortuous time and wrote a meaningful memoir called Night. He also made a visit to Auschwitz, a concentration camp he stayed at. The visit to Auschwitz was made into a moving documentary called “Winfrey & Wiesel:Auschwitz”. A memoir and a documentary are both ways to convey and expose the events of the Holocaust and their severity.

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Seventy four years ago, Elie Wiesel was taken from of his town and forced into brutal concentration camps, where he lost his family, was starved, whipped, beaten, and made to witness the executions of many innocent Jews. After three years of unimaginable struggle and hardship, he survived the Holocaust and went on to write Night, a memoir about his horrific experiences, and “Perils of Indifference”, a famous speech. Both of his works have the same powerful message: We cannot ever allow an atrocity such as the Holocaust to occur again. Elie’s message is very important, but which of his works conveys it more effectively? Night has few ways of effectively delivering Elie’s message.

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"Maus" is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, portraying the experiences of his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who was a Holocaust survivor. Enduring the impact of the Holocaust on individual lives and families, and the importance of witnessing these historical events. Throughout the novel, we discover Vladek’s experiences during the Holocaust, including his imprisonment in multiple concentration camps such as Auschwitz. In the story, Vladek and other prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were forcibly tattooed with numbers. Numbers were used for identifying and tracking prisoners.

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In the graphic novel Maus II, Art Spiegelman reveals what hardships his father had to go through to survive his time during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel depicted what him and his father went through to withstand the suffering in the concentration camps during the holocaust in his autobiography, Night. The connection between these two works from contrasting genres is the relationships and loyalty to family and friendships shown throughout these accounts. When facing critical situations, remaining loyal to your family and friends is more essential to survival than self-preservation and resourcefulness. Having close relationships with friends and family could benefit you by granting you opportunities to receive support, resources and other components to survival.

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A relationship between a father and a son is a sacred bond, one created at birth and strengthened over time. This paternal relationship is core to the value of family, a likewise bond of faith and trust. Such bonds are tested during times of hardship and pain, seen most clearly during times of war. During the events of World War II, and the gruesome events of the Holocaust, this truth was never more true. Through works such as the memoir Night, by survivor Elie Wiesel, and the artistry of the 1997 film Life is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni, these times of hardships are kept alive in common memory.

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He is very well known for his memoir “Night” and his speech “Perils of Indifference.” The message is much more prominent in his book “Night” rather than his speech. Real life examples are provided, it is more understandable, and it leaves you with something to think about. The length, connections, and abundant amount of description helps promote the message as well as the book tells us why we can never let such indifference as the Holocaust happen again.

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This can be considered to be remarkable as Spiegelman makes use of an animal allegory: the characters have animal heads and a human body. But the human body isn’t the only human characteristic: they also speak like human beings, behave like human beings, feel like human beings and think as human beings. Despite the animal heads the characters do not identify themselves as animals. For example, the girlfriend of the main character

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Perils of Indifference delivers his message effectively, but not to the same degree of his memoir, for it isn’t able to explore these the horrors of the Holocaust, and use the same extent of literary terms because of its length

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In Maus, Art Spiegelman records his personal accounts of trying to delve into his father’s traumatic past. His father, Vladek, is a Jew from Poland who survived persecution during World War II. Art wants to create a graphic novel about what his father went through during the Holocaust, so he reconnects with Vladek in order to do so. Due to the horrifying things that the Jews went through he has trouble opening up completely about all the things that happened to him. But after Art gets together with his father many times, he is finally able to understand the past legacy of the Spiegelman family.

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Through Maus, author Art Speigelman creates a compelling story of a graphic artist telling the story of the Holocaust through the memories his Jewish father, a survivor, recounts to him. He masterfully weaves tales of the Holocaust in with his troubled relationship with his father, creating a multilayered story of struggle to which readers of any age and circumstance can relate. However, this graphic novel stands apart from any other retelling of the Holocaust due to Speigelman’s portrayal of different peoples as various species of animals rather than humans. Through the story of his father and his drawing of people as animals, Art Speigelman attempts to create an accessible story of the Holocaust. Speigelman’s relationship with his father proves to be the most impactful storyline in Maus, as it is the most relatable to all demographics and serves as a conduit for telling the story of the Holocaust.

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During the twentieth century, the Holocaust, was one of the most cruel and horrendous events that took place. While living in concentration camps and on the streets over six million Jews and other minorities lost their lives due to being beaten, burned, and hanged to death under the direction of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Art Spiegelman's heartbreaking graphic novel, Maus I and Maus II, is told by his fathers view point. Spiegelman expresses the cruel and distressing tale of his parents in surviving the misery of the Holocaust not only thought words, but with meaningful pictures as well. Gaining the readers attention, soul, and mind Spiegelman gives and underlying account of the terrifying consequences of being a Jew in Poland during

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The human condition is full of paradoxes and double meanings. We can commit the most shocking and terrible acts, but we can complete the most virtuous and honorable feats. Ishmael Beah describes the appalling and violent behavior he and other children exhibited toward the human life during his time in the Sierra Leonean civil war in his memoir, A Long Way Gone. Beah also details the forgiveness and kindness of complete strangers that helped him become the man that fate meant him to be. Homo sapiens are complex creatures brimming with irony and surprises.

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Spiegelman also address the issue of post memory, and how it effected his family and his life. He also was very truthful in the way he told the story, it seemed as though he did not leave a single piece out. All in all, they way Spiegelman captures the tone of the story, along with its writing style successfully tells his father’s

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Maus and Fun Home both use the medium of comics to tell very personal and delicate stories. Art Spiegelman uses Maus to tell the moving and emotional story of his father’s survival of the Holocaust; Alison Bechdel uses Fun Home to tell the story of her father’s death and the exploration of her identity. Although both texts are different in many ways, the both use the comic medium to portray an outsider experience. While Spiegelman uses the medium to construct an animal hierarchy and Bechdel uses the medium to combine multiple moments in her life into one story, both authors use pictorial detail to shed light on the outsider experience they are each trying to portray.

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