To begin I want to comment on the way the author illustrated the characters. I thought creating the jewish characters as mice was a great idea because it properly demonstrated the way the nazi propaganda portrayed the jewish people to the rest of the populace. It was a great way to show their status in the society of the time.
Something else I thought was a great idea was that he didn't just illustrate his father's story from the past, he also illustrated his story with his father. He showed the other side of the story. He showed how his father's expriences affected his present day life and his relationships with the people around him especially his son. Through this window he created from the present to the past you could see how getting his father's story slowly brought him closer to his father and possibly patched up old hurts that Artie had held in secret within himself for years. This method of illustrating the story was also a great way to show the repercussions the war had on everyone, not just the people immediately involved.
Another thing I noticed that Artie did was to write the story with his father's accent included. He could have re-worded the story so that it was grammatically correct but instead he left the story intact. This style of narrating the story made it seem more real. The accent paired with the illustrations made it feel as if the reader were there with Artie while Vladek was cycling and telling his story.
Creating the story as a graphic novel is an idea I never would have thought of, but it was a fantastic one. At first i was taken aback by the nature of the story because the idea of such a serious topic being portrayed in cartoons almost seemed offensive but as I read I realized it was brilliant. When reading a boring black and white novel about the same old same old holocaust it's difficult to fully grasp the atrocities that took place. With the way I have grown up hearing about the holocaust it's almost as if most people have become indifferent to it. It's mentioned casually here and there, you read Anne Frank's diary and think, "Oh, how horrible, what a great story," but then something like this is thrown at you and you can't turn away from the horrible things that happened. You can't misread a line and underestimate the horrible things that happened. You have, shoved in your face, pictures, images, that even in cartoon form will be stuck in your mind for ages.
As for the comic within the comic I think Artie put that in there to help illustrate part of why his relationship with his father was so strained. It helped to clarify the feelings that he had buried deep within himself until they had gone from smoldering coals to a large hot fire of hatred and blame all directed at his father.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am seriously considering going out and buying part two.
I completely agree with your thoughts on this books. Having it in a graphic novel form has the prejudgement of being a comical story and sounds offensive at first, but once reading it, I realized how much better it made the story. like you, I am planning on buying the second part. Also, on a side note, you have amazing writing skills.
ReplyDeleteI kind of have to disagree with you about the story being in a graphic novel but that is just differences in opinion. However, I also really liked the fact that the author made wrote the book as a story within a story. We got to see his father's life during the war and then also afterwards and how the war affected the way he did things and his family life.
ReplyDeleteI love your insight into the effect that the comic style gives to the story. The pictures, and the symbolic representation of the nationalities of the characters really do tell a story of their own. I also liked what you said about Artie not correcting his father's dialect in the story. While I do think it makes his dialogue a bit harder to read, it also give the reader a sense of the culture of the time and shows how Vladek, and his way of speaking, are almost frozen in the past.
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