Reflection indicates an attempt to understand by making connections and relations. This is clearly one of Spiegelman's reasons for writing MAUS, but it is an overwhelming task at times. He expressed his frustration to Francoise on the way to visit his father: "I mean, I can't even make any sense out of my relationship with my father, how am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz? . . . of the Holocaust?"(Book II, 14) At this point in the story, Art is struggling to tell his father's story. As the frames continue, Spiegelman focuses more and more on Art and not Vladek; he realized that the process of telling his father's story, he was inevitably telling his own. At best, Spiegelman could only ever produce a distorted reflection of Vladek's story.
Spiegelman self-consciosuly constructed a work, accurately portraying the reflections of people and events in the characters' lives. To do this he made himself a character, thus showing how he distorts his father's memories by retelling them. Another option could have been to simply speak in only his father's voice, leaving his father as narrator of his own story. This choice would have ignored the role Spiegelman played in editing hundreds of hours of his father's narration and piecing together chronologically a comprehensible story. Spiegelman's work as editor, interviewer, and cartoonist dictated to some extent the way in which the reader perceived Vladek's experience.
Spiegelman's efforts to portray memories accurately are also reflected in the form of MAUS. Although it is arranged chronologically, it by no means flows smoothly. Spiegelman consciously included sharp breaks in Vladek's narration of Holocaust events with reality of the present. For example, Vladek, Francoise, and Art were traveling to the supermarket, while Vladek told of the events of 1945. Vladek suddenly interrupted his tale when Francoise almost missed the entrance into the supermarket. "This was early February, in 1945. It was no food and so crowded-- LOOK WHERE YOU GO!," he shouted (Book II, 89). This sort of construction of MAUS shows the reality of memory; it bounces back and forth between past and present.
Morrison shows the same mental movement between past and present as Spiegelman does, but she adds another component. She demonstrates the dynamic nature of memory. Once in place, a memory does not remain in the mind, unchanged over the person's lifetime. The memory is altered by the present. One striking example in Beloved is Sethe's memory of her stolen milk. Paul D arrives to her home many years after the event and added information to that already painful memory. She resists the knowledge that Halle watched from above as the boys stole her milk, but that information haunts her, altering forever her memory of Halle. The existence of Beloved as a physical memory also serves as an example of this point. Beloved does not stay a mild presence in 124 but grows and expands until she is finally destroyed.
Morrison dramatically displays the interconnectedness of past and present in the final scenes of Beloved. The central event of Beloved is Sethe's murder of her child. The event itself and its consequences are reflected in Sethe's life daily. Morrison recreates this pivotal event of the past with a different conclusion. When Mr. Bodwin, the white man, arrived to pick Denver up at 124, all the characters were in place: Sethe, Denver, Baby Suggs, the neighbors, the white man, and Beloved. Morrison writes that instead of seeing Denver- the present- they saw the past:
"When they caught up with each other, all thirty, and arrived at 124, the first thing they saw was not Denver sitting on the steps, but themselves. Younger, stronger, even as little girls lying in the grass asleep." (258)
They even saw Baby Suggs sitting in the yard. All the characters of the first scene are present, if only in spirit, in the second scene. The scene was set, but instead of turning in on her own family again, Sethe attacked the source of her fear- the white man. Morrison created this scene like a mirror image of Sethe's original crime, showing not only the interconnectedness of past and present but the simultaneous presence of the two.