Sunday, October 19, 2014

Illustrious Artist for Week 2 _ MAUS _ Giulia D.

Illustrious Artist
Week 2
Giulia Di Bella


          I drew this image to represent, not only a specific scene from the book, but basically it's main dilemma. The cats suppressing the mice. I drew a cat gobbling down a mouse as a metaphor. Since the book doesn't say that the cats ate the mice, it's just a metaphor to show that they are over controlling, and doing whatever they want, with the poor inoffensive mice. The mice are poor, innocent, defenseless creatures, while the cats are mean, arrogant, and have no mercy upon their soul. In the pages that I read for the second week, there was an event that really stopped me and definitely caught me attention: "That spring, on one day, the Germans took from Srodula to Auschwitz over 1,000 people. Most they took were kids - some only 2 or 3 years old. Some kids were screaming and screaming, they just couldn't stop. So the Germans swinged them by the legs against a wall... And they never anymore screamed..." Just like that. They would murder poor helpless children. (What did they get in return? Pride? Satisfaction? How could they earn a living by killing others? What type of job would that be?)

         


          This Golden Line was my inspiration to draw this piece. Although it wasn't exactly that specific scene, it was something that relates to not only that one, but all the other conflicts of the book. The cats (Nazis-Germans) ate the mice (Jews) with all their might and never thought twice about it. They killed them in the first opportunity they had.
         Overall, this image is just a metaphor to the metaphor from the book. (Not clear enough? Here comes the explanation.) Instead of illustrating the cats swinging the children up and beating the adults too, I just imagined something hypothetical in my mind and jotted it down on paper. This was my idea of all the conflict-scenes matched up together until now. Just an observation about the drawing, in the bottom right of the page, you can see clearly that the cat is not just eating one mice, but hundreds of them. It's just one of his everyday meals. If you added up all the mice that the cat ate in his life, you would get a pretty good idea of what happened in real life with the Jews and Nazis. And also, that was only one cat. Imagine all the cats that existed eating that much mice everyday... That would be a pretty accurate analogy.
          In addition, although the cat doesn't seem very harmful, it surely was. For the cats, they weren't wrong on what they were doing. At least they thought they weren't. They saw themselves as the good guys, not the bad and grotesque ones. These were the Jews, in their opinion. But anyways, my point, as you could see, was to illustrate the whole conflict of the book (until now), in only one hypothetical idea. And that's how it turned out. Hope it's clear enough.





3 comments:

  1. Giulia,
    I think that your drawing really pushes everyone's learning forwards. First, it has to do a lot with the book, as exactly what you described happens in the book. The mice were constantly being hurt and pressured by the Nazis. They did nothing, and still were blamed for everything, and were tortured. I agree with you that the cats didn't see what they were doing wrong, and your drawing also proves that. Additionally, your paragraphing is great and neat, and the size of the image is just right. Great job on your drawing!

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  2. While reading your post and reviewing your illustration I agree with the point that you make about the Holocaust and how it was pointless. I would also say that Spiegelman while writing the book wanted to represent the people in the book with something more relatable and eye catching for the audience. Of course people know that the Holocaust happened and millions of Jews were killed, but the book helps the reader understand just how powerful this event in time was by using the metaphor of cats and mice. One thing that I don't agree with is the Cat eating the mice. I could understand if it was Hitler feeding on the mice, but not all Nazi's or "German Soldiers" were like this. The soldiers were only blindly following orders given by Hitler. If anything the Cat should have some representation of Hitler.

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  3. Giulia, I really liked your drawing and I think it illustrates very well the authors choice of representing the jews as mice and the nazis as cats. Your drawing shows how in the war the jews had less power and could not do anything to stop the nazis. Just like mice can not do any thing to stop the cats from eating them except running and hiding. I think that the author of the book could have added one more character the dog. The dogs would be that helped the jews and fought against the nazis.

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