Face the Story

Society is an untamed battlefield where too often there are hidden motives and blood-thirsty predators hunting down people of higher position; the goal in all of this greed is power. But funny enough, no matter how much these people climb the social latter, their superiority will always fall short of  the top. This predicament is to none of their faults because the unbeatable power that reigns over all of them is intangible and unforgiving. It's identity? Time. Time never rests and flows heedlessly. No quantity of money can influence the movement of time, thus, time secures the ultimate position at the top of the power hierarchy. The characters, Daisy and Gatsby, created by F. Scott Fitzgerald were just one of many victims that were thwarted by time. Their differing social statuses had  prevented their relationship initially, but even after Gatsby had accumulated enough wealth to be considered of a similar status to Daisy, their potential had already faded. Whatever greater ...

Spiegelman utilizes Maus as an attempt to undermine the Nazi's antisemitic images. The picture on the left is one of many Nazi propaganda from the Holocaust. This image in particular features a couple that is likely Jewish, similar to Vladeck and Anja from Maus , looking for a place to hide. The Germans were rounding up all the Jewish people in order to imprison them in the concentration camps. In the background you can see a sinister-looking, black bird looming over the pair of escapees. It is accompanied by a swastika flag, expressing the feeling of Nazi power and control over all of the people. Spiegelman's art on the right (volume one, page 129) extends his cat and mouse metaphor to manipulate the propaganda in a way that supports his intentions of sympathizing with the fearful Jewish and to highlight the inhumane treatment towards fellow people. He changes the couple's appearance into mice, which in his graphic novel represent Jews, and exchanges the evil fowl fo...

Would you rather... live forever or only live until you're forty? Would you rather... live during a war or die before the war? Would you rather... be a survivor of the war or die fighting? For some the answers might seem obvious; If I can live longer, then of course whichever option lets me do that is the one I'll choose! However, this initial "obvious choice" doesn't always turn out as nicely as you would have expected. Living forever also means that time and time again, you will have to watch the one you love die and leave you. Living during a war could leave you subjected to hardships and unjust treatment. Coming out of the war alive doesn't always equal a happy ending. It could mean that you might face survivor's guilt and be haunted by the memory of your comrades' deaths' for the rest of your life. In the graphic novel, Maus , Spiegelman not only presents the drawbacks of life, but is also a victim of being alive, himself. Right off the bat...

On page 26 of volume 2 in the comic book,  MAUS , Spiegelman exposes the treatment that Art's father had to face after being captured by the Germans and brought to a Nazi camp using his illustrations.You can see that, although it is snowing outside, the Jews are still being forced to run naked and remain barefoot. In the second panel you can see that the Jew is hopping from foot to foot in an attempt to keep his feet from the cold ground. These cases are used to show the unfair treatment towards the Jewish people. The fact that the mice were forced to strip out of all their own clothing displays the German's efforts to take away each prisoner's identity, leaving them as nothing but a clone of the guy beside him. Another point of degrading conduct is, "They never even looked on what size they threw." The Nazi's handed out prisoner clothing without a concern over fit and comfort which further highlights one of Spiegleman's ideas that, during the Holocau...