Comparing Maus And Night By Elie Wiesel

The helpful, the trustworthy, the narcissists, and the hateful. These are just some of the categories that people are placed in the books Maus by Art Spiegelman, and Night by Elie Wiesel. These authors use the strategy of labeling characters with certain attributes or characteristics to make their personalities clearer. Everyone from main characters to brief appearances in these stories are given a certain nature from the beginning. Art Spiegelman and Elie Wiesel both use characterization to display the different types of people in the Holocaust. Perhaps the most direct way that these authors use characterizations is through displaying their personalities by their actions and thoughts. By using the way they feel and expressing how they think

For example, both of these stories depict a father role for the main protagonist or narrator. But where they differ is that the father in Night, Shlomo, changes from a helpful and benefiting character, to a destructive and hollow version of his former self. This is unlike Maus where people, for the most part, stay in their respective categories for the remainder of the book because their personality does not falter. In both of these stories the characters personalities fluctuate, but the only time the Spiegelman changed the way a character was represented, was by allowing Vladek to put on a pig mask, and only for a few frames. Another way these memoirs differ is the use of direct and indirect characterization. Indirect characterization is the act of placing people in categories subliminally without blatantly revealing their motives or reasons. In Night, only indirect characterization is used and it reflects how Wiesel uses figurative language to reveal their personalities.While in Maus, Spiegelman uses both indirect and direct characterization. He blatantly puts the characters in categories by animal type, but also looks deeper, and puts them into subcategories inside their respective categories. For example, all Jews were depicted as mice in Art’s stories, but inside the stories two very different personalities were portrayed by Lucia and Vladek. Overall, there are many differences between these two stories and how they depict the types of people in the