Personal, Social, and Cultural Contexts Established by...

Personal, Social, and Cultural Contexts Established by the Frame Story in MAUS The use of the frame story, an overarching narrative used to connect a series of loosely related stories, pervades literature. An example of a frame story on a large scale - tying together a whole book-length work, not a simple short story - can be found in Art Spiegelmans graphic novel MAUS. Each of the narratives six sections is framed with snatches of the interaction between Vladek and Art during the interview that supposedly occurred to create the book. This framing helps us learn about Vladeks character, which we would not know about from his rather flat, unemotional Holocaust narrative. In coming to understand this book, we must also†¦show more content†¦Finally, we expand our view once more to the cultural context. While the social context looks only at the people immediately surrounding the protagonist, the cultural context is all-inclusive, taking in everything that has happened to them and the wider society in which it occurs. Large-scale social trends fall into this category. We begin by considering personal context as it occurs in MAUS. The personal context is created by Spiegelmans establishment of who this story is about. In MAUS, Spiegelman intends to give us the story of a single individual. We take note of the title to the first volume: My Father Bleeds History. Clearly, the story is intended to be about his father and the history that he might bleed, that is, his story in the Holocaust. The subtitle A Survivors Tale reinforces this concept of the singularity of Vladeks experience - it is the story of one survivor, not many. Vladeks experiences in the Holocaust do not differ drastically from those of the average Holocaust survivor - he has a number tattooed on him (one assumes), he was in a concentration camp, and so on. Therefore, it would be easy to misconstrue the novel, with the episodes of interaction between Vladek and Art omitted, as generic Holocaust narrative. However, repeated returns to theShow MoreRelatedUnderstanding Art Spiegelmans Mau s1204 Words   |  5 PagesWhen beginning to understand Art Spiegelmans 1991 Maus, one must also remember that no literary work exists within or around a vacuous context, and that each piece of literature is ultimately influenced by the social and cultural contexts of both the author and the reader. This graphic novel is no exception. Each of the six sections within the book is framed with bits of the interactions between Vladek and Art during the interview that seemingly occurred to form the book. This framing acts as a