Jeffrey Santos Essays (1232 words) - Literature, Comics, Raw

Jeffrey Santos Professor Shrivastava Experiencing Literature 10/15/17 The Complete Maus Essay Prompt In English class we read a book called "The Complete Maus" by Art Spiegelman. I have been given an assignment that is based off of Spiegelman's use of the famous comic strip. He uses the comic in many different ways but with one main way being, to help the reader fully engage into his thoughts. The Washington Post stated that what Spielgelman did was "impossible to achieve in any medium but comics." Comic strips help the reader dice into the small but important details of the story by giving them interesting drawings that spark their attention. Comics also come with words to give the reader more of an easy understanding of what he or she is reading. This being said, my goal of this paper is to prove the Washington Post in a positive way and to help their statement be correct. To help explain my stand on this, in my first paragraph I will talk about Spielgelman's representation and reliability of his story. Since he relies on his father's thoughts, some may think that the reliability of the drawings may not be valid enough to fully believe. In the second paragraph I will discuss the multiple time frames and how he shifts from one time frame to another but also has multiple present things within one time frame. And in my final paragraph I will discuss the shifts of point of view and how he runs two parallel points of views and still achieves his goal in the story. Representation and reliability is something all if not most people worried about with Spiegelman's comic strip. The main difference in Spiegelman's representation of memory vs other authors is his use of drawings and intriguing images. Even though he relies on his father's thoughts and memories, he also uses real images to help us understand and solidify his father's memories to be true. On page (75) in Spielgelman's book he draws his father's family sitting around a dinner table discussing the hardships of the time that they were living in, and shortly after that there is an image of his son dumping his food onto the table. Clearly his father and his family are very self-giving and protective of everyone still breathing. Although Artie and his father had a rough relationship in the beginning, the comic helps us understand that by the second comic story, Art and his father become close again and begin to understand each other like they used to. With the two of them bonding through hi s father's memory filled talk, it helps us believe that Artie actually helped us readers understand his father's memories and a more diverse and interesting way. He represents his father to his best ability and helps us readers understand fully. He uses his representation within the comic extremely well and it would be hard to tackle all of these things in a written novel. When writing a comic strip you must pay attention to your use in change of time frames and Spiegelman does that and then some. The reader moves through several different historical positions throughout the whole story. They also move through narrative events such as pre Holocaust, the Holocaust, and the post Holocaust, but also, within one time frame there can be multiple times present and co-resent. Maus intertwines the past and the present extremely well to the point where they are simply parallel to each other. He combines the different subject histories of each protagonist, and the different Nazi views located in Rego Park, New York. Artie manages to add many small narratives within the bigger pictures throughout the story. For example, Arties struggles to understand his family's origins and himself as well. Although Artie was talking about the Holocaust through the whole story, he uses small examples to show his struggles in the story as well. Artie asks Vladek for Antje's diaries and Vladek then tells him that the diaries are gone. The interesting part of this story is that Artie then remembers that he burned them himself and this memory puts him into a deep depression. The way Artie showed us his depression through the comics really showed how hurt he