Monday, October 20, 2014

Question Commander

What is the cultural and educational background of the author and how did this background influence the book?  In what ways do the events in the books reveal evidence of the author’s world view?

The author's father, Zeev spiegelman was a holocaust survivor in Poland so his background influenced the story. The story is about how the author's father survived the holocaust witch leads directly to a historical event the holocaust. Also the book show evidence of Art spiegelman world point of view by changing the characters into animals. Making the Polish Jews mice, the Nazis cats and the non jewish polish people affected by the holocaust pigs. This way showing spiegelman's point of view shows that during the second world war the Jews from Poland are completely overpowered by the nazis because cats are stronger than mice. Also this can be misleading because some people might think he is tying to show that nazis are better but that is not true.


  1. I think that the educational background came from the wisdom his father had during the war. Spiegelman's father after his adventures, he also acquired experience from this occurrence and so it leads to more of knowledge sharing. To me this book is mostly about Spiegelman sharing his fathers knowledge that was acquired during the war. Also it could be a legacy, because it brings others the knowledge on how it was hard to maintain yourself alive in times like this, so therefore it makes us acquire the knowledge that doing a war is horrible because it does horrible things to thousands of people.

  2. Fernando,
    I like how you said Poland influenced the story. As the protagonist is basically just telling his story through the holocaust the entire book that is important. As readers, we may wonder what kind of story could be coming through if Vladek weren't a surviver, the book could be revolved around how Art felt about the death of his dad. Thank you for boosting my thinking,
    Julianna Mello

  3. I think that Spiegelman knew the troubles his family went through during the Holocaust and wanted to express to the rest of the world how bad and destructive it really was. He used this through his talent of writing comic books. I made the theory that because every body knew about the Holocaust and what happened Speigelman wanted to expand peoples knowledge and let them experiance what it was like living through the Holocaust. At the time Maus was published in 1991, comics were a popular for of literature and this gave Spiegelman an advantage to what he was trying to achieve.