Word Whisperer - Gabi Campos

Maus by Art Spiegelman
Pages 5-71
Gabriela Campos
Word Whisperer

Word Whisperer

Simile: "[...] And I can give you my old one, it's still like new!"(page 69).

In this phrase, Vladek is giving his son his old jacket and attempting to convince him to wear it by comparing its state to the one of a brand new jacket. In my opinion, he must be doing this to either try to get rid of a jacket that he never wore on a daily-basis (thus, why it's in perfect state) or he's trying to make his son dress like he did when Vladek was his age, maybe even lying about the jacket's state.

Repetition: "[...] So proper, so respectful." (page 23).

In this phrase, Vladek is telling his son that he shouldn't write about Lucia (the woman who was obsessed with him) in his book, because it wasn't proper or respectful. However, his son insists that it makes it all much more human and it's basically the moment in the book where Vladek starts actually talking about the Holocaust and Hitler. I think the author did this to emphasise the fact that Vladek, being raised in the olden days, is very proper and well-mannered, thus why he doesn't want his grandson to publish the material on Lucia. 

Foreshadowing: "Just pray that they [the Nazis] don't start a war." (page 33).

This phrase is clearly an example of foreshadowing, because the book Maus is about Vladek's experience in the Second World War, which was started by the Nazis, in other words, that sentence is predicting what is going to happen further into the book, which is the exact definition of foreshadowing. I don't particularly have a reason for the author to have used that technique in that moment of the book, other than to make the scene seem realistic, since the individuals living in Europe at that time, knew how violent the Nazis were.

Link

This image represents what the character who said the sentence mentioned above saw the moment the words left his lips: a Nazi flag being raised at a nearby town. That is the reason why I chose to put it into this blog post.

Flashback: "[...] The first time I went into the army for 18 months when I was 21 then every 4 years I went to Lublin for a month to train." (page 45).

This sentence is a flashback because nearly the entire book of Maus is (I predict) Vladek telling his son his story of the second world war, such as his experience and when his son asked him a question regarding his service to the army, Vladek had to interrupt his story and look deeper into the past to tell him the phrase above and since Vladek interrupted the story and had a type of "flashback" this sentence is clearly a flashback.

Link

This image shows us a common training technique for the army and since Vladek was telling his son about his training for the army when he was younger, I felt as if this were the appropriate image to insert.