Vonnegut and Speigelman

Vonnegut and Speigelman's story telling techniques have some similarities and some obvious differences. Vonnegut and Speigelman are both telling war stories and have flashbacks to the past, but Vonnegut's flashbacks are much more all over the place while Speigelman's flashbacks are more fluent and seem to have a chronological order. Vonnegut writes in a narrative way while Speigelman writes in a comic strip style. Unlike Vonnegut, Speigelman's story seems like a more believable, human story. It was hard to determine if Vonnegut's stories were real or imagined. It is also very interesting to that Speigelman's story is a graphic novel and seems very much like a comic strip. All Speigelman's characters are animals. This can represent Speigelman coping with the war. To make a war story into a comic seems like Speigelman is trying to stay distant from what actually happened in the war. Telling the story as a comic may be a way of coping with what happened in the war, using animals as characters makes the actually "war story" seem less serious and more comical than something that really happened. Even if it did happen, and Speigelman makes his story feel much more believable than Vonnegut's, a comic strip style is probably a way to make it feel less real and less serious than it actually is to Speigelman. Vonnegut also uses the phrase "So it goes" to cope with everything that happened to him in the war. Both of these authors have very weird, interesting ways of coping with war through their story telling. If I had to pick, I feel more drawn to Maus, just because it a graphic novel. I enjoy graphic novels and I love how creative it is so far. Using animals to represent real people is such a clever way to depict how a person can appear to you. Vonnegut's story telling was just a bit too back and forth to me, I was always confused. The graphic novel helped me keep track of what was going on because I got the chance to look at pictures while reading.