Out of Kansas :: Personal Narrative Papers

Out of Kansas I find it on the high bookshelfMaus A Survivors Tale. Ive heard about it. Its about the Holocaust. Mice play the Jews, and cats play the German Nazis. I understand it already. Cats are predators to mice. Thats easy enough. I start reading. The close people are pigs. Wait a minute, I dont get it. Why are they pigs? Im getting confused. I inadequacy to give up. Instead, I pick it up and start again.We begin as moody troubleshooters we see a puzzle piece that doesnt fitwe both chop off a corner or throw the thing away. What is a stereotype besides a way of grouping things in align to understand them in a complete and perfectly organized way? To say that something didnt fit would be an admission that we are unsure of the gentleman we are living ina frightening thought. Further, we are often conditioned through art to recognize these stereotypes without thought and to react identically as a communitya means of creating and controlling an ideal society. Theater theo rist and playwright Bertolt Brecht says of European theater, It is well known that contact between consultation and stage is normally made on the basis of empathy (136). The goal is often to make audiences identify with the characters and the stories so that they will reach a natural enounce of controlled catharsis at the end. Many audiences have thus learned to expect and enjoy such a style.Audiences seek art that will pick them up and pull them along for the entire ride. Underground curious, illustrator, and magazine editor Art Spiegelman meets that desire in his novel-sized comic Maus. Spiegelman describes his work The goal was to get people lamentable forward, to get my eye and thought organized enough so that one could relatively, seamlessly, be able to become absorbed in the narrative (Jun 10). A report card that absorbs the audience into its own unslowing whirlwind sounds a lot like Brechts description of the cathartic theater of control. However, Spiegelmans works haven t always had the comparable goal. In his early career, the question that motivated his art was, How many obstacles could you put in somebodys path before the reader just caved in and couldnt handle it anymore? (Juno, 8). The goal was to stilt catharsisto kill it in its tracks in order to provoke active thought. I read his 1972 comic strip Skinless Perkins.