The Harsh Reality

  We all like to fool ourselves into being someone we are not. Every day, we take on many different roles – a stressed student, an all-star athlete, and a perfect child. Yet, we never realize that we end up trapping ourselves into this perfect reality that we’ve created. Perhaps Art Spiegelman felt the same way when he realized where Maus had led him. In part 1 of Maus, Artie is simply interested in learning more about his father’s past and what he went through, but part 2 is starkly different. In this part, Artie begins to realize that Vladek’s story, along with the stories of the millions of Jews that went through the Holocaust, was not his story to tell. On page 41, Artie is depicted sitting at a drawing desk placed upon a pile of dead Jews. This image shows how the drawing easel, the same one that he created the first book on and is the stem of his success, now rested on the deaths of those Jews. It also demonstrates how Artie’s depictions of Vladek’s story were inevitably bury...

Sometimes, we don’t realize just how much we hold on to the past. It follows us every minute of our lives, until we begin to live around it – like we, or rather we of the present - are guests in the bodies of our past. One specific man who embodies this idea would have to be Mr. Vladek Spiegelman. In particular, on page 81 of chapter 4 in Maus part 1, Vladek rides his standstill bicycle as he converses with Artie about his past, in particular when he wanted to give Richieu away for his [Richieu] safety. At the bottom of the page, the author includes an interesting series of images of Vladek peddling slowly at first, then speeding up while standing, and then stopping. Most people stand on a bike when they attempt to go faster, however, when Vladek begins speeding up, he says “but his son remained alive; ours did not” (81).   This clever use of the speed of the bike shows off how Vladek is attempting to speed up the memories of losing his son, along with all the other trauma that he ...