Casual Contemplation

Everyone is assigned an individuality at birth. Our names, our parents' names, our ancestry, our race - all these factors and more are bundled up in a permanent, unalterable package and handed to us, a package which we carry around our whole lives, whether we like its contents or not. As we walk through the journey that is life, we build another package for ourselves, adding and subtracting whatever we choose. Its contents are always changing; it's a fully customizable  set. Together, these packages make up our identity - both who we are and who we want to be.  Now let us switch gears...Once upon a time there was a man living in the 1920s. The package he was assigned at birth stated that he was James Gatz, son of "shiftless and unsuccessful farm people", and hence he was destined to be a poor man (98). He didn't like this. So he built another package for himself, in which, among other things, he added a medal from "Montenegro" for "Valour Ext...

Why does Art Spiegelman choose to represent Jews as mice? The reason for this is that Jews were literally depicted as mice, representing that they were "vermin", in many Nazi propaganda posters.  " Rats: Destroy them " The chapter title pages stem from this sort of Nazi propaganda and are heavily symbolic. The above image is Chapter 6 of volume I. On the poster, the rat is depicted as having the face of a Jew. What appears to be a crumpled piece of paper lies beside the rat, to further emphasize how unimportant and filthy the Jews were thought to be. On the cover page, two mice (Vladeck and Anja) are standing in a literal mouse trap. This is the chapter in which Vladeck and Anja are deceived by the smugglers, which is what the trap represents. While the images are very different, there are similarities. The beam of light in the background of the cover page resembles the piece of paper on the poster.  Both images' title text looks somewhat similar i...

A few weeks ago we were talking about This is Water and how “there is no experience you’ve had that you are not at the absolute center of”. We talked about how everybody experiences life from their own perspective and puts themself at the center as the protagonist. We want to talk about how an event affected us , even if we were not the ones most greatly affected. This concept reappears in the secondary storyline of Maus , about the relationship between Art and Vladeck. Throughout the story we see that both of them are greatly affected by the Holocaust, but they were both affected in drastically different ways. As much as they try, neither could ever understand how the other was affected.   Vladeck was affected directly in the obvious way - he was a victim. Actually being alive and experiencing the Holocaust firsthand is something that no one could ever sympathize with. Art was affected indirectly, with something like survivor’s guilt. He feels “ some kind of guilt about ...

I chose to analyze page 155 from Chapter 6, entitled Mouse Trap . In this scene, Vladeck is "trapped" by the Polish smugglers who betray him. The letter from Abraham, Mandelbaum's nephew, is almost like the "cheese" used to attract the mice to the trap. In the second panel, the train gives off a feeling of looming dread through the stripes, which reappear several times throughout the story.The stripes go in different directions on different parts of the train. This, along with the windows and doors depicted as black holes. make the train almost look like a prison.  The inside of the train, depicted in the third panel, looks even more like a prison. At first glance it looks like the German officers are looking into prison cells. The left side, where the Polish man is sitting, is solid white, but the right side is covered with stripes. The fourth panel appears as if it is an offshoot of the third one, as if when the officer in the third panel turned to his ...

When we think of freedom, we think of it’s literal definition, which, as defined by Google Dictionary, is “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint”. Freedom to us means being able to do what we wish and not being under the command of someone else. To David Foster Wallace, however, freedom is something else. In This is Water he describes “the really important kind of freedom” as “[involving] attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over”. According to him, “That is real freedom” (5). Wallace describes freedom as living consciously and being aware of what’s going on around us. He describes freedom as having the ability to deter from our innate self-centeredness and having a mindset of empathy.  At first, I disagreed with Wallace. I agreed that living consciously, being aware of your surroundings, sacrificing and having empathy are ...