Maus

This blog will be dedicated to Maus volume one. This graphic novel is interesting for me because it is about holocaust memory and about the relationship between a holocaust survivor and his son. Of those two things I have to say the interactions of Art Spiegelman with his father is the more interesting of the two sides of this tale. This is interesting to me because the relationship between Spiegelman and his father is tumultuous at best.
This can be broken down in to a couple different attitudes that Art has towards his father. His attitudes seems to be split between contempt for his father’s miserliness and awe at what his father went through during World War 2.
The contempt for his father is interesting to me because it shows that Spiegelman really hasn’t grown out of the teenage angst phase and it’s also an interesting reaction to how his father raised him. This is shown by the prologue in which Spiegelman get ditched by his friends and his father’s reaction is to say that you can only find out who your friends really are when you are all locked in a room starving. This is definitely an unusual approach to parenting to say the least, but I think it also contributes to the way Art Spielgelman behaves when his father throws out his coat and then replace it; Spielgelman is angered with his father, because he believes his father is saying that Spielgelman’s stuff, his life isn’t good enough for his father. This coupled with the suicide of his mother leads Spielgman to be trapped in this state of adolescences with no visible way out. This is an interesting insight into him psychologically, and really he all but admits the fact that he is stuck in his development in his comic “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” this is interesting because it shows he has a realization that he is trapped, but his actions with his father make it seem as if he isn’t even trying to move on in his life. An interesting contrast to this is the reverence he shows for his father when he is telling the tale of how he made it through World War 2.
The respect he has for his father’s struggles is most obvious in his persistence to hear his father retell the story of what happened to him, but also is obvious in the panels that cut back to the present day. Whenever Art visits his father he is always bothering him to tell more of his story, even when his father wants to do other things and just spend time with his son all we see is Art constantly bothering his father to hear more of the story. Then once he is able to convince his father to tell his story it goes on for 5 or 6 pages and cuts back to present day and in more than one case we see Art sitting at his father’s feet like a child listening to a bed time story. Arts adoration for his father’s struggle is apparent in the work on Maus volume one.