Art Spiegelman's graphic novel MAUS (followed by MAUS II) follows some generic conventions of the genre, including using panels and dialogue to tell the story of his parents' experiences during the Holocaust. However, it breaks some conventions and has a style all its own. For example, Spiegelman breaks some of the panels and lets other panels spill out of their conventional spaces so that his father, Vladek, can provide his perspective on the story....
Art Spiegelman's graphic novel MAUS (followed by MAUS II) follows some generic conventions of the genre, including using panels and dialogue to tell the story of his parents' experiences during the Holocaust. However, it breaks some conventions and has a style all its own. For example, Spiegelman breaks some of the panels and lets other panels spill out of their conventional spaces so that his father, Vladek, can provide his perspective on the story. In addition, he uses animal allegories to tell the tale, as Jews are presented as mice (playing on the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as victims) and Germans are presented as cats. Each nationality has a representative animal. Spiegelman inserts himself and his reactions to his parents' story and to his parents' lives after the Holocaust, giving the narrative a more modern and complex twist with multiple narrations. For example, he says, "I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams" (page 16). He acknowledges the limits of his ability to re-tell his parents' story. Finally, Spiegelman also uses real photos of the family and maps interspersed with traditional illustrated panels, giving his narrative a postmodern feel and suggesting that there are multiple ways to record and understand the past.
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