The Shawl And Similarities Between Maus And Ozick

Haunted By the Holocaust One of the darkest eras of human history, the Holocaust, has been portrayed and recounted countless times in literature through diaries, fictional narratives, novels, and other forms. But, due to the depth and seriousness of the topic, short stories and graphic novels do not lend themselves to telling the stories of those impacted by the horrors of the Holocaust. It takes a masterful storyteller to impart the harsh emotions onto readers, but Ozick and Spiegelman are able to through their works “The Shawl” and Maus. In “The Shawl”, Ozick weaves together the story of a woman, a girl, and a baby as they march to and suffer inside a Nazi concentration camp. While the Holocaust is never named, its effects are visible and

Through this unconventional format, Spiegelman unravels the Holocaust and presents its history in a way that has never been seen before. In both “The Shawl” and Maus, the Holocaust provides a historical backdrop to powerful, gut-wrenching stories of survival, hope, and horror for stories with vastly different characters, structure, and tone. While handling the same historical event, “The Shawl” and Maus treat its characters very differently, as Orzick focuses on three fictional women of varying ages while Spiegelman writes about his own family, especially his father. In Ozick’s “The Shawl”, readers follow Magda, Stella, and Rosa as they trek to a concentration camp and suffer inside it. Due to the short story format, very little background on the characters is given and even their relation to one another is hard to make out. One thing, however, is quite clear: Magda is Rosa’s baby and relies on her and her seemingly magical shawl to stay safe, comfortable, and alive during the march and her time at the camp. Stella tags along, not quite young enough to be cared for the way Magda is but not old enough to understand the consequences of her actions like Rosa. Stella is “jealous of Maga” and wishes “to be

Due to the different formats of the works, the tone of the stories differ but each reveal perspectives on the Holocaust. In Ozick’s “The Shawl”, the tone is devastating and horrific, and remains static throughout the story until it hits the climax within the last paragraph of the story. Maus, on the other hand, is longer, and thus Spiegelman can have a more dynamic tone. Maus plays with audience expectations through the usage of animal representations of characters, which provides irony and even specks of humor throughout the graphic novel. Yet overall, Maus is extremely dark, similarly to “The Shawl”, but the darkness is built into the images and the jarring contrast of the comics instead of sparse prose. In Maus, there are opportunities for Speigelman and his father to reflect, causing an introspective tone that is not present in the simple narrative of “The Shawl”, which adds another layer of darkness as the characters dive into how the Holocaust impacts them decades past the events. While both stories are remarkably dark, they handle the intense subject matter differently through their tones. There is no one way to tell the story of the Holocaust, allowing the somber poeticness of “The Shawl” and the harsh criticism of Maus to both shed differing perspectives on the same infamous period of