This week, we read Maus.
This was the first time I had read Maus, but I had heard of it prior. I knew that it was about the Holocaust and had personified people as mice, but otherwise I did not know much about it.
I think I had a different perspective of what Maus was going to be like when I went into it. I did not expect it to be from the perspective of the artist--interviewing his father on what his Holocaust experience was like. Instead, I had expected it to fully immerse us as a retelling of the Holocaust, but just with mice. This is more like almost a biography and autobiography--a biography for the father, Vladek, and a small autobiography for the author, Art.
The first thing I took notice of was the hints of Art's mother, Anja's, mental illness. While Vladek said all her medication was just for her skinniness and nervousness, I extrapolated, by the fact that she had committed suicide, that she was prone to mental illness. Perhaps depression or anxiety. And later on, after the birth of their son Richieu, she developed postpartum depression.
One thing that really struck me was the death of Richieu. I already knew he wouldn't make it through the war, as indicated earlier in the graphic novel, but I did not see it coming how he would die. I expected him to be somehow caught and put in the camps, but instead his death really surprised me. For him to be poisoned by his own family seems both like such a betrayal and such a cop out, almost. Maybe he would have survived the camps--he was a healthy young boy, after all. The fact that they don't linger long on the fact of his death too also surprises me. A single page for the death of someone in your family, even if the artist himself did not know him.
I thought the way that WW2 and the Holocaust was portrayed was very interesting in Maus. It makes it so much more personal and relatable, even if the characters are mice, which might be done for aesthetic but also might be done to distance humanity away from the atrocities of the reign of Hitler. Instead of reading it like we do in history classes, we experience it almost first hand ourselves.
This was the first time I had read Maus, but I had heard of it prior. I knew that it was about the Holocaust and had personified people as mice, but otherwise I did not know much about it.
I think I had a different perspective of what Maus was going to be like when I went into it. I did not expect it to be from the perspective of the artist--interviewing his father on what his Holocaust experience was like. Instead, I had expected it to fully immerse us as a retelling of the Holocaust, but just with mice. This is more like almost a biography and autobiography--a biography for the father, Vladek, and a small autobiography for the author, Art.
The first thing I took notice of was the hints of Art's mother, Anja's, mental illness. While Vladek said all her medication was just for her skinniness and nervousness, I extrapolated, by the fact that she had committed suicide, that she was prone to mental illness. Perhaps depression or anxiety. And later on, after the birth of their son Richieu, she developed postpartum depression.
One thing that really struck me was the death of Richieu. I already knew he wouldn't make it through the war, as indicated earlier in the graphic novel, but I did not see it coming how he would die. I expected him to be somehow caught and put in the camps, but instead his death really surprised me. For him to be poisoned by his own family seems both like such a betrayal and such a cop out, almost. Maybe he would have survived the camps--he was a healthy young boy, after all. The fact that they don't linger long on the fact of his death too also surprises me. A single page for the death of someone in your family, even if the artist himself did not know him.
I thought the way that WW2 and the Holocaust was portrayed was very interesting in Maus. It makes it so much more personal and relatable, even if the characters are mice, which might be done for aesthetic but also might be done to distance humanity away from the atrocities of the reign of Hitler. Instead of reading it like we do in history classes, we experience it almost first hand ourselves.
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