Every week it seems I get more behind in my blog posts. The end of the week seems to always sneak up on me.
I really enjoyed re-reading Maus this week. The last time I read it was over ten years ago so it was almost as if I was reading it for the first time. Something that also made reading it again a pleasure was the discussion we had in class this week. There were so many great ideas brought up during discussion. It is always interesting to see what others notice in the book that I may have overlooked. I was especially fascinated by the discussion about the part animal characteristics are part of the story.
Cats, mice, dogs, frogs and pigs are just animals. But when you say any of these animals, inevitably certain characteristics come to mind. For me, when I think of a dog I think loyal, strong, protective. Cats are standoffish and cunning. Mice are disease carriers and gross. Frogs are slimy. Pigs are cute and fat. This is what I think when I hear these animals mentioned. But it was different when I was reading Maus. I saw those mice as shy and helpless. The pigs strike me as piggish, to use a human characteristic. The cats were not house cats but almost vicious Cheshire Cats. I think Art Spiegelman did a wonderful job using animals to represent human nature.
Another thing I did notice about Maus was the fact that it was as much a family story as much as it was a story about the Shoah, to use a term from class. Every child at some point in his or her life wants to understand his or her parents. To understand what makes a parent tick is to understand part of one’s self. By hearing his father’s story, Art Spiegelman hopes to understand his father better. I think that is why he is so upset by his father burning his mother’s notebooks. Because of this act, Art’s mother is now lost to him forever. It makes me realize the importance of getting to know one’s parents while you still can.
I think you are right in saying it was the loss of a chance to know his mother better and perhaps even understand that question of "Why?" that sent Art off the deep end about the journals.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that his mother did not leave a note seemed to really leave him without an idea why she killed herself. He spent a lot of his life looking for an explaination I think. I wonder if he has finally found peace on the issue?
Maybe he see's it as her inability to come to grips with the horrors she has survived and the guilt of surviving that was talked about by Art and his wife?
I think that the use of animals to represent different ethnicity in maus was very interesting, It is not an original concept at all, but I had never seen it in an illustrated form, which can make for all sorts of neat uses of the concept like the masks that are used when Jews are trying to impersonate being poles. Also for the use of different animals to represent different races might portray the races from a Nazi perspective. The Jews were represented as mice which of the three major races portrayed in book one of maus is the animal with the least human connection, and according to the Nazi perspective Jews were subhumans. The Poles were not quite as bad, according to the Nazi's they were dumb but at least they could keep them around to work, and while pigs are not beasts of burden in real life they are an animal that we keep around on farms are raise for food, unlike mice. The cats is definitely where this seems the weakest, because from the illustrations these look most like house cats, and while all cats are generally regarded as sly and a more intelligent animal then pigs or mice, cats are generally not thought of as being incredibly strong. The cats are still stronger than the mice though, and possibility the pig but that is probably debatable and depends on the type of cat.
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