Battle for the crown: Vonnegut vs. Spiegelman

It is a lot harder to spot the differences between Vonnegut and Spiegelman’s styles of writing than what I originally thought it would be. Before I started reading the differences were already obvious, or so I thought. One was a novel and the other one was a comic book, done. Easy peasy. Then I started writing this blog and changed my mind completely. Even though Vonnegut has a very unique way of telling his story, he uses a stream-of-consciousness approach. In which events do not occur in a chronological order but rather flow into each other based on the narrator’s thoughts. Spiegelman uses a more traditional method of narration. They both make it sound more like a bedtime story as opposed to a biography like most stories about the war. Reading about the holocaust in the form of a graphic novel is a little bizarre because it is a very emotional and difficult subject. The way Spiegelman portrays the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, despite being very clever and ironic, makes it less serious. Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians and time traveling in a similar fashion. I like Spiegelman’s narrative better for several reasons; one, because the Holocaust is taught and talked about all over the world I am much more familiar with the holocaust than the bombing of Dresden. This makes Spiegelman story more appealing and familiar in a way. Two, I am a visual person, so the illustration help me understand the story much better. Lastly, because Spiegelman’s story is in chronological order it makes it less confusing and more enjoyable to read because I don’t feel the need to re-read passages to see if I missed something, like I often did in Slaughterhouse 5.