Bender Week 12

Volume one of Maus is driven by the use of pathos through storytelling. Having a background of what had already happened during the Holocaust, Spiegelman uses the true personal story of his father to make the events of the holocaust as real as ever. In the first volume as a whole, the Germans lack of value of human life is what struck me the hardest. On page 63 Vladek says that they shot and killed 600 Jews at one time. This is just one of the many examples where the Germans seem to not think the Jews are living breathing things. Also, the older version of Vladek affected me by use of pathos. He is not happy and does not live the way a normal human being would. Art almost makes it that it's worse to be a survivor and that he is not a victorious righteous Holocaust survivor. Even though Art portrays his father as unbearable, you can not help but feel sorry for him. Every one of his friends seems to pass in the course of the book and he is changed as a person permanently through his hardships in the war. I think the largest pathos piece in the whole book is the comic that Art inserts walled "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", which describes for the first time how Art is affected by what his parents went through during the Holocaust. The human images and brutal description of his Mother's suicide makes it all real and relatable, and puts you directly in his shoes.