Franklin Díaz Mirás

Professor Cynthia Pittmann

INGL 3104-134

1 June 2018

Maus Reflection 

          The Graphic Fiction Maus presents a story that take place durt the World War II in a different way that helps the reader better understand the events using different figurative languages like personification and metaphors. 

          The visual elements helped to create the story's meaning by the colors and the drawing techniques. For example, All the story was in black and white because it could help us understood it wasn't a love or a funny story. The technique to draw the mice and the cats were different. The drawing of the mice portrayed the mice as weak, innocent and tiny. The drawing of the cats portrayed the cats as mean, big and they had a mouth, something that the mice didn’t.

          The dialogue in which the text is written allows a casual way of speaking, causing a casual way of understanding. The story expresses facts and history in a casual dialogue way. The text in the panels have a significance too, some of the words were in bold to give it more force to the text and emphasis to the words significance. Also, the shape of some bubbles of dialogue were different. The spiky bubbles meant that the message was told with agitation or desperation. Also, sometimes there were bubbles with a square shape, this meant that the message was told by a narrator which in this case would be Vladek because he is the one telling the story to his son. The font of the words was always the same and it fitted with the drawings because it was a simple one, and the drawings were simple too.

         The meaning or purpose of this comic was to show the hard and horrible times of the holocaust. Vladek represented the Jews who survived the holocaust who didn't gave up never. Using a witness of the Holocaust, as Vladek, to tell the story was a very intelligent move because it gives credibility to the story and gives a much richer perspective to the comic. The pigs represented the persons who had nothing to do with the Nazi/Jews situations. Some of them were in favor of killing the Jews and some of them helped the Jews because they weren’t in favor of what the Nazis were doing.

Works Cited

Pittmann, Cynthia.”Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” Reflection Class Assignment. UPRRP, 1 June  2018.