Vonnegut vs. Spiegelman

Both Vonnegut and Spiegelman use a non-consecutive narrative to tell their stories. Both start with the beginning of the process of the writing, which is to say when the author is still in the early stages of the creative process. Vonnegut begins with him meeting the people he met in the war to discuss how he should write his book and Spiegelman’s begins with him meeting his father to hear the father’s story about the war.

Another similarity is the narrative continuously jumping from the past to the present and back again. Vonnegut of course would have his story return to many different “presents” as well as many different “pasts” by way of his time travel device. Speigelman on the other hand has a much more organized style. The son and father occupy the present and the time of the story the father relates serves as the past.

There is also a similar manner in the two works in that the styles are very unconventional. Vonnegut uses his time travel and alien abductions and Spiegelman makes all of the people in his book, to include himself, an animal of some kind. Jews are portrayed as mice, Poles are pigs, and Germans appear to be cats.

A difference is the plausibility of the narrative. Vonnegut wrote in a manner that made it difficult to determine whether or not what was real and what was imagined. Spiegelman on the other hand tells a very human story that is entirely believable.

While Vonnegut seems to be using analogies to express what he wanted to say regarding the war, Spiegelman takes a much more direct approach. Spiegelman’s story is very much like an oral history. His plot is that of one generation passing their stories down to the next orally. Vonnegut never really reveals to whom he is writing, we are just left to follow along in the timeline.