The themes of MAUS, including the parent-child connection, the children as victims and the literary nature of the topic and medium are all interestingly interrelated to similar themes in Beloved. These connections do not stop there. Rather they are continued throughout American Literature. Another example of this in our course comes from Ceremony.

"There are much worse thing, you know. The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten. They destroy the feeling people have for each other. ... Their highest ambition is to gut human beings while they are still breathing, to hold the heart still beating so the victim will never feel anything again. When they finish, you watch youself from a distance and you can't even cry-not even for yourself."

This sentiment is itterated many times in the narratives of holocaust survivors, their children, former slaves and survivors of the bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In repeating this sentiment, these survivors bring up specifics of the events that plagued their lives, but the sentiment is the same. This is seen in the survivor tales that John McGowan discusses in his Common Experience page. Other sites that are worth checking out are the Slave Narrative site, the WPA Life Histories Home Page.

The ability to tell one's story is important to the healing process as well as to maintaining the cultural elements that were almost destroyed. The quote from Beloved (above), ends by saying that when the destroyers are finished, they leave only a shell of a human that is unable to feel anything. Telling one's story is a way to begin to feel again. Vladek is perhaps a poor example of this, given Art's statement that his father had little need to be a testiment to the occurrances of the holocaust, that he needed simply to spend time with his son, and found this storytelling the opportunity to do so. This comes across very well in the book. (Though I disagree with her opinion of the subject, Roshanna Sabaratnam offers a good overview of the opposite view: that telling his story helped Vladek to come to terms with the events documented in the book.)