My experience at reading Maus

At the very beginning I wasn’t really motivated to read this comic since I had lots of thing to do, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I am not a person keen on comics and it took me a while to understand why I was so caught by the story, so I will tell you why you should read it.

First of all, the fact that it is a graphic novel helps a lot to people who are not likely to read, and for me it helped me a lot to take my imagination far, because it makes you feel everything more real, for example when Vladek explains the starvation diet in which his father put him. In other cases for example when it is talked about places in Poland it uses maps and that helps a lot to people with orientation problems.

Secondly the narrator is not only one, there are two narrators in first person, and the story is stated in a conversational style creating a sort of dialogue through the book by giving you two perspectives that makes the story more active, at the point that I started feeling like Art, feeling the same anxiety as Vladek was telling his stories. So in a way as you are reading it you become Art listening to his father carefully going through different emotions since the story is really cruel.

Furthermore, there are lots of things in this comic that I really appreciated, for instance, the fact that humans are represented by different kind of species considering the food chain. The fact that story graphics so well how all things took place in the Jew oppression by Germans. And how the story made feel so sensitive, thinking about all the people that lost their families, and how they suffered in this hostile era.

All things considered this novel is totally worth reading, but there is something that I didn’t understand, and that happened at the very end of book two, after his father has told the whole story finishing with a “happy ending” and it is when he called Art with another name, he called him Richieu, his older death brother. And if we consider that Art-Vladek’s relationship wasn’t too close, what does it mean?