ipl-logo

Cruelty In Maus And The Education Of Augie Merasty

1000 Words4 Pages

Oppression and cruelty are mutual themes in both Maus, by Art Spiegelman, and The Education of Augie Merasty, by Joseph A. Merasty and David Carpenter. Both works of literature contain numerous examples of brutality, abuse, and violence. In The Education of Augie Merasty, Augie was sent to a residential school due to his culture and ancestry, while in Maus, Vladek was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp due to his religion. Both Vladek and Augie faced cruelty and oppression due to their ancestry, religion, and culture. Vladek, Augie, and countless other people were victimized and oppressed, not for any crime or wrongdoing, but simply for a part of their identity that does not make them any morally, physically, spiritually, or ethically better …show more content…

For Augie, this meant physical, sexual, and verbal abuse. During his time at the Residential School, Augie was abused multiple times, by multiple different authority figures. An example of this abuse was when Augie was sleeping and Sister Mercy had heard him laughing and talking in his sleep, but believing he was awake, she hit the left side of his face with the strap (Merasty 42). This cruelty towards Augie left physical and emotional scars that stayed with him throughout his life, as could be seen in his struggle with alcoholism. For Vladek, this meant that his basic needs were not adequately met to sustain life, he was branded with a number, he was forced to work, and he had the constant threat of death. An example of the cruel treatment against Vladek is the death march that the Auschwitz prisoners were forced to walk. As Vladek described, “All night I heard shooting. He who got tired, who can’t walk so fast, they shot. The more we walked, the more I heard shooting” (Spiegelman 82). As they were on the death march, the guards and Nazi’s continued to exhibit violence and cruelty over their victims, by shooting those who could not keep up. In both cases the cruelty and oppression against Vladek and Augie is obvious. The treatment that they both received during their oppression is horrific, inhumane, and

Show More
Related
1191 Words | 5 Pages

How Maus II portrays humanity’s poor treatment of one another Imagine being with your loving family in your cozy home, living your normal life, day by day. You close your eyes and the next thing you know, you're in an unknown, scary place. You don’t know where your beloved family is. Barbed wire surrounds the areas, unlike your traditional fence back at home. Everyone and everything you once had is lost, and soon you’ll go with them.

Read More
562 Words | 3 Pages

In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when the ss officers were transporting all the prisoners from buna to another camp and whenever somebody couldn’t keep running the ss officers shoot them. “They had orders to shoot anyone who couldn’t sustain the peace”(Wiesel 85). The ss officers cruelty to the prisoners led them to give up, they stopped trying. If someone stopped and the officers didn’t noticed, he would probably die under the feet of all the people behind them. As the author describes his experiences, many other examples of inhumanity are revealed.

Read More
247 Words | 1 Pages

In Elie Wiesel’s Night he and many of the other prisoners felt victimized by the guards and their use of power over them. One example of abuse and dehumanization is Franek, the foreman. He noticed that Elie had a gold crown in his mouth, Franek wanted it. When told to give it to him, Elie said no, so Franek started harassing and abusing Elie’s father. Elie’s father was unable to march in step, which caused a problem for him because everywhere they went it was in step, “This presented Franek with the opportunity to torment him and, on a daily basis, to thrash him savagely.

Read More
383 Words | 2 Pages

Both protagonists have endured severe oppression from their totalitarian regime, however, in the end, V was more successful in overthrowing the injustice government V was the sole survivor of the illegal genetic testing done by the government in order to further understand human’s ability to survive epidemic and diseases. He went through unimaginable torment, he suffered memory loss and underwent physical abuse. After being tormented in Larkhill Concentration Camp, he is scarred for life. What is done to him is horrendous.

Read More
534 Words | 3 Pages

During the time of the Holocaust, many human rights were violated. Elie Wiesel was a survivor of the holocaust, and has written the book titled Night describing what life was like for him and others during the harsh time. His book has become very popular because is shows awareness of how bad the times were. Wiesel says, “The SS officers were doing the selection: the weak to the left; those who walked well, to the right.” (Page 96)

Read More
477 Words | 2 Pages

“He stopped sawing. ‘Friends? Your friends? ... If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week... ...

Read More
936 Words | 4 Pages

Elie Wiesel’s true story Night, is an intriguing story about the Holocaust. The guards and even veteran prisoners are cruel to others. The punishments, even for tiny faults, are unthinkably horrid. Man does not care how old or weak someone is; this makes the children and teens change and act inhumane towards other prisoners, even towards their own family. It clearly, and painfully, explains man’s inhumanity to man.

Read More
1440 Words | 6 Pages

The Significance of Loved Ones “‘The only thing that keeps me alive,” he kept saying, “is to know that Reizel and the little ones are still alive. Were it not for them, I would give up’” (Wiesel, 45). This is said by a Jewish man attempting to fight an onerous and exhausting fight against death. His family was his will to live.

Read More
1031 Words | 5 Pages

Throughout Maus, Vladek is telling his son Artie about how he survived the Holocaust. He explained to Artie that before the war, life was good for him and his family. He tells him everything about his experience during the war as well, from the relationship he had with his family and Anja, to his friendships with both gentiles and Jews, to things he might of found or kept throughout the war. However now, a few decades after the war, Vladek’s lifestyle has changed drastically from during the war, and even from before the war. Vladek’s friendships, relationships, and everyday life has changed due to the Holocaust and WWII.

Read More
1125 Words | 5 Pages

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

Read More
1196 Words | 5 Pages

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.

Read More
649 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More
714 Words | 3 Pages

In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.

Read More
645 Words | 3 Pages

It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.

Read More
794 Words | 4 Pages

“You would, would you? Fatty!’ Ralph made a step forward and Jack smacked Piggy’s head.” This is just one of the many instances cruelty has played a crucial role in the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Peppered with symbolism and motifs, cruelty proves to be the most essential to major themes.

Read More

More about Cruelty In Maus And The Education Of Augie Merasty

Related Topics

Open Document