Blog Post 12

A moment in the first volume of Maus that had a profound impact on me because of the emotional reaction it provoked was the last page, 159 in my edition, of the volume. On this page, Vladek and Anja have arrived at Auschwitz and they knew, or at least thought, their lives would end here. The reason I think this had such a huge impact on me was because the gate to Auschwitz was so clearly drawn and it was much larger than anything else in the volume. This way the reader cannot miss the gates to Auschwitz, and we can infer that Vladek and Anja’s lives are about to get even more difficult. This caused me to have an emotional reaction because it just made me think about all of the awful things that are going to happen to them next. According to Jay Heinrichs this scene would be pathetic because it would be used to manipulate the emotions of the reader and therefore would be and effective use of pathos because it would bring out the emotional side of Spiegelman’s argument if there was one. If this was going by Heinrichs than Spiegelman would be able to manipulate his reader into having an emotional reaction, however I believe that sense the story is about the Holocaust, and the particular page I am talking about has a detailed drawing of the front of Auschwitz on it, there isn’t much manipulating that is needed.