Blog 6

Maus is the Pulitzer Prize winning story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe. Dan, his son a cartoonist, tries to come to terms with his father and his experiences through the Holocaust. Speigelman's fathers' account of how he and his wife survived Hilter's Europe if filled with harrowing stories of near death experiences, improbable escapes, and the terror of confinement and betrayal. The harrowing stories given by Spiegelman are given in the perspective where characters are represented by animals; Jews as mice, Nazi's as cats and Germans as pigs. These animal characters have underlining messages as to the morality of the characters and their relationship with one another; consequently Jews are being hunted by Nazi cats surrounded by indifferent German pigs. The use of cartoon characters, such as animals, to represent characters is a theme not represented in a Tim Obrien's a Things They Carried.  However Tim Obrien's The Things They Carried does mirror Spiegelman’s use of metaphors within Maus, these metaphors are often subtle commentary’s on the effects of war. One of the earliest uses of metaphors by Spiegelman is when he states "I must be seeing things. how can a tree run? .... But I kept shooting and shooting. Until finally the tree stopped moving."  in The Sheik (48 Speigelman). This quote best exemplifies how Speigelman uses metaphors within his stories to make subtle commentary about war and its participants. Obrien's use of metaphors is utilized throughout The Things They Carried to draw the distinction between death and war. When reading Maus I discovered that Spiegelman's use of narration and descriptive story telling abilities grasp my attention consistently. Maus is about WW II and the holocaust, both of which I have a high amount of intrigue, which is why I find the story to be comparably more interesting than The Things They Carried.