Maus-Night Blogging Assignment

Night and the Maus books is a great companion. The book Night was based on Elie who survived the camps in the Second World War. The comparison is almost identical except for the main characters. In Maus one and two Vladek compares to Elie because of their fight and determination through the war. Art Spiegelman does an amazing job at creating two powerful graphic novels that tell of his father’s horror in the war. Elie and Vladek both lose their family and struggle starvation and death as it tries to overtake them.

            Elie looses faith and become more distant toward his father. In Maus Mr.Spiegelman does not have strong faith and love towards his father from the start. One thing that can be pulled from the observations, is that war makes both Elie distant from his father and Vladek distant from his son. Vladek and Elie strive for one thing in the war and that is life. When in the war Elie has no family and that does not matter any more than their survival.

In Night Elie becomes distant towards his father and at his fathers moment of death Elie thinks after a night alone "'Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of the dead weight, so I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself'".(101) The concentration camps had made Ellie so numb and even towards his own father and regrets the things he has thought of. In Maus Vladek and Mr. Spiegelman get into a fight. Vladek can not even dream of wasting food and explains how he wands Artie to take his Special K and he refuses. “Then just save the damn Special K in case Hitler ever comes back” (78).

This should be read together in the future classes to come. The books give very different perspectives of that horrible war and are focusing on the same emotional devastation that occurred. This is pretty much all that can be said about the books. They were very well written and give great angles of the war and what horrible torture happened to the jews.