Skip to main content

"They hanged there one full week."

                             


In Maus, Spiegelman tells his father's story in an extremely vivid and captivating manner. Page 83 discusses one of Vladek's most undigestible moments of the holocaust: the hangings. Even when Art displays the gut-wrenching illustration in panel two, the faces are covered up, turned around, or tilted in a manner in which the reader literally can't look them in the eye. They're completely stripped of their identities that only Vladek recognized. To the Nazis they're merely walking targets dressed in costumes of formalwear. In the following two panels, Vladek narrates short summaries of each of the characters hanged, isolating only each of their feet. This was drawn not simply for the act of dramatizing the hangings. It once again goes to show how readers, unaffected pigs in the audience, and the Nazis are only able to see identical hanged legs with little significance. This combined with Vladek's accounts of the individuals reveal that every one had a story, but not everyone's is always told. The next panel's nightmare scene makes it completely stand out from the rest of the page. The haunting memory of these hanged Jews tower over Vladek, tormenting him in the cage he's trapped in, represented by the windows and the image of the Jews themselves enclosing him in this inconceivable reality. This burden casts a literal and figurative shadow over him, constantly terrorizing him and darkening his world. This emphasizes the tragic underlying truth that the trauma of a firsthand victim can never be entirely replicated, nor can it be explained or taught to anyone else in its most excruciating form. Notice that this shadow isn't cast onto his son, whom readers see happily playing in the corner with a doll. Although this trauma may not be directly placed onto him, his playing with the doll resemble those helplessly dangling like puppets, suggesting that the past is inevitably, indirectly forced upon him. 

Comments

  1. ACDecember 3, 2023 at 9:31 AM

    I like how you noticed the striped shawdow doesn't fall onto Richieu, which shows how the trauma of seeing the hangings is not directly placed upon him. However, later, he does die during the war, inevitably forcing the past.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Varsha SeshadriDecember 3, 2023 at 9:46 AM

    I liked how you analysed all the hangings that were in the book!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Aleezay AhmadDecember 3, 2023 at 3:03 PM

    I like how you analyzed the hidden faces and connected it to the dehumanization of Jews. I hadn't thought about it that way before.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dear Mr. Brown

Dear Mr. Brown,  My name is Arya Shah. I am seventeen years old, and a senior at Troy High School. I stumbled upon your poem, "Labor", initially out of reluctancy to check-the-box on what I thought was a labor intensive English assignment. However, I quickly became so engrossed into the poem and I forgot about the trivial work I was pulling my hair out for just a few minutes ago.  What I admire most about this poem is its ambiguity, and the unsettling atmosphere it leaves. While you begin ranting about "cuss[ing] cutting grass for women", and shift focus onto the women, I thought surely the poem would reveal a tender heart, or wholesome relationship with them that would romanticize the labor or at least blur its pain. But instead, it's so discomforting. Your force us readers to sit with the fact that "they're all dead" because it isn't only the labor that's painful, but also the love. I find that so hard to accept most times, and can't ...
Post a Comment
Read more

You're Nothing Like Me

You're fat. Your flabby  little  not so little actually, stomach rolls over your sari's petticoat. Pathetic.  You're ugly. Your eye bags are stripping away your youthful happy-go-lucky femininity which was an era long gone as your stretch marks remind you.   You're naive. Your hands are shedding their skin, bruised and burned because the kitchen is now engraved into your body. It's these hands with which you sign your children's papers so they can go on field trips and become people of their own, hands with which I once used to forge my own parent's signatures because I wanted to control my "destiny"—always written by someone else.   You're unwanted. I believed in Bollywood movies. I believed in a romanticized future, where a language barrier in a foreign country would mean they would laugh at my cute accent. Instead, they just laugh at you. They insult you and you can't even understand them. Your mannerisms aren't quirky, they're d...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cleanup On Aisle Seven!

I'd like to preface this blog by saying the following original poem is written in a style completely out of my comfort zone, so through my eyes as a poet, it appears a bit of a mess. But hey, "dissonance is a kind of sense" I guess.  Cleanup on aisle seven Where the neatly stacked pyramid of oranges has fallen Where people pass by Without giving a fly Spurting juice under their fashionably protected feet Now there’s a traffic jam on aisle seven Where someone bumps into a shelf of wine And when people point fingers at each others’ faults All that’s left to say is  It isn’t mine  So someone travels to aisle four And rips open a pack of paper towels to clean the floor  But the liquid has migrated far beyond control  Where now are also  Soggy unraveled rolls  Finally the janitor comes over But he slips and his head lowers  Now there’s blood everywhere  But who should care  To clean the aisles When the janitor is also the owner  I initia...
Post a Comment
Read more