Maus I: Chapters 3 & 4

Continuing my readings into the Maus I novel, I've come up with a few questions about how it will progress and, of course, how it will end. To do this blog post justice, I've decided to split it into the chapters so that those who are reading it can easily follow along.

In chapter 3, Vladek, Art's father, tells the story of his father making sure he, and his siblings, are not in proper physical shape to be drafted into the war. I found this rather intriguing because it just goes to show what great lengths the people of this time were willing to go to in order to keep their families and loved ones safe. Vladek expresses this story in a way of disgust because he didn't like being starved like that but, from what I can infer, he realizes what he meant to his father in order for him to starve his son. This correlates with Vladek being drafted into the army in 1939 and retelling his story of being in the trenches and killing another soldier. This scene gives the reader insight to the mental damage that Art's father endured and it also foreshadows worse events to come. In this chapter, the reader gets a sense of how badly people are being treated in the "work camps" and how cruel the Nazi army is being to all Jews.

Chapter 4 is titled, The Noose Tightens, which can only lead a reader to hypothesize about the events that are about to take place. Nothing good is going to come from a chapter that has the word "noose" in it's title. I found this chapter to be very depressing and almost hard to get through just because I knew it was going to end in some family member being taken away. In this case, it was the grandparents. The scene where the Gestapo come to round them up was very morbid for me because I couldn't imagine someone taking my grandparents from me, or even on the other hand, being the grandparents and having to leave my family for the fear of them taking the rest of my family as well.

From reading these two chapters, I already have a sense of how the rest of book I and book II are going to be. I've read a lot about the Holocaust throughout high school but reading about it in this type of genre is more interesting to me than I previously thought it would be. Another thing I find interesting about the novel is the characters portrayal as animals. The jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, and everyone else is a pig. Its pretty obvious why the jews are mice and the Nazis are cats but I think the reason that everyone else is a pig is because most people knew what was happening to these families and didn't do anything to try to help them, so the author portrays them as swine. Just a hypothesis!