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.
I guess it's interesting that both stories deal with horrible events, the destruction of an entire city and the Holocaust, but they both convey them with less "serious" ways. Parts of Vonnegut's book made me laugh and were funny, but mixed with someone dying a paragraph later. Similarly the parts about the alien abductions and the human zoo were bizarre, not what you would expect.
ReplyDeleteAnd approaching the Holocaust with cartoons is also unexpected, and it does seem a little weird now. I think we'll get really involved though, and the power of the story will be brought home by the images. It compliments the relatively more simple story telling.