maus 1

Albert Rayle
10/29/07
Ms. Hara
Maus response 1

As I sat in the library reading the Maus cartoon I have had countless students coming up to me and informing me about how it is a great story and how they loved to read it. And every time that happened I felt like they were pulling my hair out because all I wanted to do was read the amazing story that sat in my lap. Art Spiegelman is performing a hard task of telling two stories simultaneously and is doing a surprisingly good job at it. As if the story of a concentration camp is not interesting enough the author also talks about his father in present day and how he is struggling with his health.
The story is written in an interesting way because Artie Spiegelman is the son of Vladek, and Vladek is now an old man recalling his memories. The two of them did not have a great relationship while Artie was growing up but the reader can already notice that there relationship is improving as they sit and talk about the war. Also Vladek will be in the middle of telling a story and stop suddenly to do something regarding his poor health. In the first chapter he told the story about meeting his wife while he was on a stationary bike, it is suppose to be good for his heart. Then in the next chapter Artie continuously brings the reader back into the reality that the story being told is in the past by making Vladek spill his pills all over the table. Then Vladek starts ranting about how the doctors give him a bunch of random pills and how he self medicates from the directions he finds in his prevention magazines. I found this somewhat humorous because my grandfather is the same way.
My grandfather served in World War 2 and he has the same mentality as Vladek when it comes to his health. I know a couple of other survivors of the war and they all seem to have the same general mentality that they can do it better themselves. I think that this might be because they had to completely rely on themselves during the war in order to survive and it has never really left them. I am not sure if my grandfather ever killed a man but Vladek told Artie that he did. He told the story about the moving tree and how he shot it and then later inspected the body. He looked at the dog tags and found out that the guys name was Jan and he then said “well at least I did something”. The only reason that Vladek got out of a lot of his sticky situations was because of his own intelligence. He was smart enough to out think some guards and smart enough to pick his battles.
One interesting thing that Art Spiegelman is doing in this story is his choice of character for everyone. He makes all of the good guys be mice and the Nazis are cats. I think that he is trying to show how helpless the Jewish community was in this time by making them be mice. It is like Art is saying that this was all a big game of cat and mouse and the cats have the mice trapped in a corner. Another interesting thing that Art did was that he made everyone else, including the police, be pigs. When I think of a pig I think of an animal that does not care for anything other than itself so I think that Art is trying to show that a lot of people were not taking any action against the Nazis.
I thought that this is going to be a very interesting read and I am hoping that the action continues to go the way it is. And just to reiterate on what I said earlier, I kept a tally of how many times someone stopped me from reading or writing this paper to express how good it was and the grand total is nine. I had nine people come and express their love and every time I have to shoo them away and tell them that I completely agree. In fact the story is so good I found myself reading a head a little bit.