Same Genre, Different Effect

Schirato and Webb, in visual narratives, explain that understanding the qualities of a genre will give the reader knowledge about how that genre tells a story, how it narrates. They say perceiving certain qualities of genre helps reader to get direct knowledge. Also they showed about flexibility of the genre boundary which hints to us that same genre also may vary with each one’s specialty. I brought here Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus to compare with Persepolis in the concept of genre. In this essay, I examined what differences they have, and what kind of direct knowledge helps us to understand context.

First of all, they report in a similar way about cruel times under corrupted power, when their nation was extremely unstable within an abnormal state. Second of all, they are telling about themselves who survived among countless victims. Some of them are family members and some are their close neighbors. These graphic novels have similar qualities of a genre in terms of story which are very familiar to us. Many students, at least heard once about The Diary of Anne Frank from their text books. And if they love movies, they must have seen Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Roman Polanski’s Pianist. Even Persepolis is not dealing about Jew’s history, but it is on the same line since it has many cruel scenes full of bleeding and dead people during the hard times.

First, if we see the book cover of Persepolis, we can see the color of the book cover is red. In the center, a girl in the veil stares at us while crossing her arms on the desk. The subtitle, the story of a childhood seems unnatural with the provocative red color, because the color reminds us blood and violence. Readers might be intrigued by unharmonious design and girl’s expression on her face. Similarly, a Holocaust story Maus uses the color red on the main title which located at the top of the book. At the center, there is a Nazis symbol with a skull of the cat which directly represents the symbol of Holocaust, victim’s story. Down side, two mice wearing human’s jacket are kneeling and staring at us with small black eyes. The subtitle of Maus is also red that is survivor’s tale. This gives critical information that this is a survival’s story from the Second World War. However, compared to Persepolis we are intrigued about the character’s animal portrayal and connection between red color and the word bleed from my father bleeds history which is another subtitle at the bottom.

As we turn the page, Maus starts its story with a short episode before showing gun fires or concentration camps. When Spiegelman (son mouse) was young, he was racing with friends. He lost and cried out to friends who made fun of him because he fell down. To his son’s frustration, Vladek (father) advised with remembering past “If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, Friends!”

By contrast, Persepolis first provides episode’s title the veil which draws readers’ attention because we saw this veil before reading on the cover. Directly she uses the words like “Islamic Revolution” and shows her memoir in school. She is telling her story to the reader, but not to the characters in a novel. Narration seems to be first point of view which comprised of dialogue balloons and captions. However, in “Maus”, main narrator is the father (mouse); he is telling his memoir to his son who visits regularly. Direction of narration is not directly toward readers but his son that we as readers become son. The structure is different from Persepolis that readers get more information from the father’s voice with dialogues or captions between son and father.

Both graphic novels are dealing with sad episodes during their hard times. But they have different structure and different drawing style. Compared to Persepolis, the Pulitzer awarded novel, Maus uses indirect narration that we may feel like observing a person who experienced the Second World War. And also the way to start its story affects readers that when we read first page we may change our mind which we expected before in terms of genre.

The picture from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maus.jpg