Analysis Of Art Spiegelman's Maus Series

Many people are convinced that being a good person will lead to good things happening to them, basic karma, but this is not always true. The 21st century for America so far includes two major disasters, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. David Eggers documents the Zeitoun family’s struggles of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in his book Zeitoun. Choosing specific details, Egger’s purpose is to juxtapose Zeitoun’s humanity before Katrina to the cruelty Zeitoun was given after, and how Americans should reflect on those disparities.

Spiegelman has presented his father’s memoirs in a creative way by portraying racial groups as animals and by making the story into a graphic novel. By presenting it in comic form, Art Spiegelman is able to better capture the emotions of those in the graphic novel. Not a dedication in the conventional sense, the book eternalizes the memoirs of Vladek and those around him.

Goldhagen’s view of the perpetrators of the Holocaust can be seen as super-intentionalist in the way he views the German population to have largely willingly colluded with the Nazi regime because they to held the same eliminationalist anti-Semitic views. To make this point, he uses what he sees as the willingness of ordinary, largely untrained and unindoctrinated Germans in the Reserve Police Battalions to carry out mass killings of Jews (Goldhagen: 1997:206). This means he portrays the perpetrators of the Jozefow massacre as “willing executioners” and goes at great length to show them to simply be “ordinary Germans” based on their political, socio-economic and geographical background (Goldhagen: 1997: 213). Central to Goldhagen’s argument that the Policemen massacred Jews willingly, is their reluctance to excuse themselves from the operation when given the opportunity. The main “opportunity” in which to do this, is the moment before the massacre, when Major Trapp (the officer in charge of the

The first thing to address while discussing the author’s purpose is to examine the motivation of the main character, Raskolnikov. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov becomes an ubermensch, and part of this is that he does not take into account

The character Vladek in Art Spiegelman’s Maus greatly changed throughout the book. Events due to the Holocaust shaped Vladek into the person he is at the end of the book. The Holocaust caused Vladek to become extremely frugal, to have an obsession with tidiness, and to not be able to trust anyone. Vladek became extremely frugal from living through the Holocaust. In the beginning he was poor and couldn’t buy extravagant things.

In the book, the Truth About Stories, Thomas King sheds light on the power of stories. King explicitly enforces that one must take caution in the way he or she tells a story, since it will shape one’s thoughts, decision-making and future (2). Through the use of literature, King weaves his way through native history, anecdote by anecdote, informing his readers about the importance of storytelling. “Stories are wondrous things,” the author writes. “And they are dangerous.” (9). To prove this, King mentions two creation stories; the differences in these stories is the way in which they are told. The first is a famous native story called, “the woman who fell from the sky”; this story is told in a complex, persuasive way (10-20). This story discusses a society emphasizing the value of cooperation as the animals work together to create a better world (21-22). The second story, a Judeo-Christian biblical story, describes a Western Capitalist society. It is told in a historical, punitive and direct fashion, underlining a society of boundaries and punishment. King highlights that storytelling is not just simply telling a story, rather it is how the stories are told. King uses these particular stories to show how different stories shape people’s perspectives, which impacts their ideas, thoughts and decision making. Therefore he addresses how sensitive storytelling may be, for once a story is told, it can never be taken back (10). This is true in all realms of life, cautioning

In the “Saboteur” the Tone of the story is direct and harsh. Throughout the entire story we read about an innocent man being blamed for a crime he didn’t commit simply for the entertainment of the policemen. The Policemen are cruel and arrogant “… the stout policeman at the next table stood up and threw a bowl of tea in our direction.” (288) and set the tone of the story to be quite depressing and miserable. Two poor men are wrongly accused and mistreated by men who are supposed to prevent such situations. The Tone makes the theme of abuse of power evident through its brutality and injustice.

“we were dealing with strange ideas...[a] moral breakdown that has been going on for two decades. One by one all of our traditional moral standards went by the boards, or were so disregarded that they ceased to be binding…We found our great cities and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us” (Document 1).

In Art Spiegelman's Maus, a graphic memoir of sorts, we observe the life of a holocaust survivor close to him, Vladek, his father. Art recounts the struggles and difficulties his father had, and to an extent, how Art himself suffered. In Maus, Art tries to portray his father as honestly, and as unbiasedly, as he can manage. Throughout his narrative, we see the aspects of Vladek's personality that Art purposefully brings to the forefront. Vladek is a ladies man, who had no trouble finding himself a woman. He is an accomplished business person, who seeks every opportunity to trade and better his situation. However, he is still human, and Art also points out Vladek's flaws as well as his successes. When the holocaust takes place, Vladek's goes through it and emerges a changed man. One of the largest difference is that his hoarding and his tendency to value things over people certainly became a bigger part of his personality. This is shown throughout Maus, and it is one of the more considerable changes we can see in Vladek. In answer to how the Holocaust affected Vladek, specifically his sense of possession, we can see that Vladek's greed was not a substantial part of his character, but after surviving through torment and trauma, it definitely grows and becomes one of his major defining traits.

Often times in literature, we are presented with quintessential characters that are all placed into the conventional categories of either good or bad. In these pieces, we are usually able to differentiate the characters and discover their true intentions from reading only a few chapters. However, in some remarkable pieces of work, authors create characters that are so realistic and so complex that we are unable to distinguish them as purely good or evil. In the novel Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky develops the morally ambiguous characters of Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov to provide us with an interesting read and to give us a chance to evaluate each character.

Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed. Ordinary Men

In “A good man is hard to find”, revelations” and “Everything that rises must converge” by Flannery O’Connor clearly portray a theme of racism based on selfishness, pride and grace. All three main characters undergo a prophecy like moment that eventually leads to the loss of their dignity and selfish attitude and in turn they each achieve grace. This paper will provide a detailed analysis on how all three main characters go from being selfish to eventually self-analyzing themselves and in turn they mature and gain grace and change the way they view others. My investigation of these stories will show how each protagonist had to experience some form of tragedy in order to become self-aware of the way people perceive them. O’Connor presents in these stories how each main character and also in reality people in life need to be brought to a tragic like moment in life that causes them to not continue in the ways they are accustomed to.

Crime and Punishment: First Draft In the Article " Crime and Punishment" written by Edward Wasiolek, the author sustains that the entire structure of the novel is based on the opposition of values and moralities. The protagonist Raskolnikov seems to embody this structural ambivalence. His nature is essentially benevolent, but the way he acts is the result of the social oppression that weigh on him. The author also points out how every single character that is present in the novel seems to be the mirror of a particular trait, manifest or obscure, of Raskolnikov's personality.

The graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman conveys many varied and powerful themes to the reader. Spiegelman has conveyed the themes Guilt and Survival by using various methods including narration, dialogue and several comic book techniques to show the expressions and feelings of the central characters. Guilt is an especially strong theme in Maus, appearing many times with Art and Vladek. Survival is another primary theme in Maus. Images are used by Spiegelman to display the ways that Vladek survived during the Holocaust.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” wrote a famous author by the name of Charles Dickens about his story. He could not have gotten mankind more spot on. In each and every one of us there is a bit of both good and bad. We are not painted in black in white, but in an array of colors with an array of emotions and feelings. Another man that ponders about humanity is Marcus Zusak. In his book, The Book Thief, the narrator wonders “how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant”. Death, the narrator, has been through the ups and down of humanity and is perplexed how the same thing could be good and bad, pretty and ugly. Many of the characters in this