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Vladek's Maus Analysis

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Approximately 6 million Jews died in Hitler’s concentration camps. The only way to comprehend this horror is through hearing a survivor’s story. Art Spiegelman 's comic book, Maus, guides the reader through Vladek’s firsthand experience in the Holocaust. The author retells Vladek’s story exploring the themes of identity, fear, power dynamics, imprisonment, horrific nostalgia, and how the past shapes the future. The use of imagery, framing, and wording explain the underlying themes in the story. The climax of Vladek’s story is when he and his wife Anja are fleeing Poland and the Gestapo catches them. They are then taken to Auschwitz, which was their greatest fear. The techniques in this section enhance the themes and help end the book with …show more content…

Everything in the background is hazy out, leaving the visual emphasis on the silhouettes captured mice with their hands raised in surrender. The color black is often associated with mourning, which is linked to sadness. Having character colored in completely with black shows that the character is overcome with sadness. Since this imagery is happening after they were captured, it 's linked to the theme of imprisonment. While on the truck headed for Auschwitz, all characters except for Anja and Vladek had darkly shaded faces (panels 2-3 Spiegelman 157). The harsh shading on faces suggests despair and resignation which leads to the theme of imprisonment. The last key element in the imagery is the use of borders. In Maus, there are two timelines occurring, one in the 1940’s, and one in the 1970’s. At the time when this book was published, the 1970’s would have been considered to be the present which makes the following intriguing. Panels that occur in the 1970’s have no borders while the panels that take place in the 1940’s have borders. One of the reasons for this is because the past has a definite shape, it already happened. The present is what’s happening now, therefore it has no definite

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As part of the fascist conquest to create an ideal race during the World War II, Jewish people struggled to survive by evading their Nazi hunters and persecution. In Art Spielberg’s Maus he depicts his dad’s, Vladek, Holocaust experience through comics as his dad informs him of his WWII experience. In the novel Jewish people are drawn as mice and German’s cats to show how there is a constant conflict of pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes. Vladek and other Jew are forced to hide, evade, and trick the Nazi soldiers in a similar fashion to the game to survive the persecution of his people.

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Maus is a story about the survivor that is Vladek Spiegelman. His son Art Spiegelman includes the interview process and the story of how the Holocaust formed the person that his father became. He went from a passionate, free-spirited young man to an angry, short-tempered man. The war had effects on Vladek that couldn 't be as easily understood unless the book was written and went so into detail about each aspect of his life. The complexity of Vladek Spiegelman is one of the main topics that is spread throughout both of

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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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Art Spiegelman offers a very unique point of view in his two narratives, Maus I and Maus II. In these two books, Spiegelman takes us through the life of his father Vladek and his journey during World War II in Europe. Spiegleman also confronts how post-memory has effected him through the years, even when he was growing up. These two books reflect perfectly on a survivors story using symbolism and analogy.

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Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus is a story that clearly displays the appalling treatment of the Jew's during this time. To effectively show this, Speigelman uses a variety of powerful literary devices. These include the use of black, white and shading, the way people are depicted and font & text size. A good example of this is the inserted comic, Prisoner On the Hell Planet (pg.

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