- How did historical events influence the ideas in the novel? What cultural issues may have influenced, challenged, or inspired the author?
As we already know, Maus was based on the second World War so the whole context was a historical event on its own, but since my post cannot be this short, I decided to pick out one by one, the exact references from the second World War. First, lets star with the country and cities that appear in the book. As shown in the map below, a lot of Poland were occupied by Nazi forces and Sosnoweic, the main city the book was actually a major ghetto. Before the war Sosnoweic alone had 30,000 jews inside. The Nazi plague then spread even farther and then they started to make extermination camps close to cities. Extermination camps. Think of those words for a second. Literally taking the lives of about 30,000 jews and that is only the beginning. The World War II was a cultural issue on itself and the author is just trying to emphasize the savagery and blood bath that the World War was. So I ask you, is this book meant to be even with such heavy themes?
Heitor,
ReplyDeleteGood post, you had some good research on your post.
Your post states that the book is supposed to be based on the World War. In my opinion, I disagree with your thought.
In the book, the main character, Vladek, is telling his son about his entire life. Furthermore, he would stop multiple times to complain about his new life with Mala, and how she is nothing compared to Anja, his first wife. This idea of "wife" is important because it is the main theme of the book. Throughout the story of "Maus," we can see a comic Vladek's son made, which is Anja's suicidal. Adding on, the father keeps remembering of Anja while telling the son the story, since he loved her a lot. Connecting this to real life, Spiegelman's (author) mother actually suicided. When Spiegelman went to the hospital for having a problem, the mother suicided before he was out of the hospital. This shows the connection of the book and real life, since in both cases, the mother dies.
Spiegelman incorporated multiple ideas of suiciding in the book due to his own mother suicide, showing that the main reason why the author wrote the book was because of his mother's death.
A question I have is, did this idea change the way you think? The reason I ask this is because this is a completely different idea from yours, and I wanted yo see if you are still with your idea of war, or not.
Daniel
I agree with you, because it is not how the battle happened that is important for the book, but how it affected the character, which in this case was Artie. I find it that Artie's father was affected a lot by this Jew discrimination made by Nazis, and so this story, this legacy was shared through the book Maus. I say that this affected Artie's father so much that he didn't like remembering it, but he also learned from that experience, which led him into sharing it with Artie, so that Artie could pass it on for future generations, about the knowledge he had come to receive from these adventures.
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