the way it really happened:"
Reflections on Human Tragedy
The past exists with immeasurable importance in every person's life. The importance of the past is reflected in the extent to which actions and thoughts of people in the present are affected by the past. The works of Toni Morrison and Art Spiegelman construct and interpret the intermingling of past and present. Converting memories into literature, they attempt to create the simultaneous existence of past and present. Using a unique storytelling method, Spiegelman incorporates many levels of interpretation to tell the story of the Holocaust in MAUS: A survivor's tale. A close examination of MAUS will reveal a literary work that accomplishes the work of a novel and more by using features unique to the comic book form. For example, the comic book forces the reader to use his mind to imagine the action in between the frames. Spiegelman's drawings are a reflection on Vladek's life, interpreting events, particularly during the Holocaust, to make MAUS more than a comic book.
In Beloved, Morrison also creates many levels of interpretation to examine the past's reflection on the present. The primary focus of the book is one particular moment- Sethe's murder of her daughter- but slavery is the overarching theme. Morrison shows that the memories of both affect the characters, even many years later. Leah Marcus articulated this point in an essay on Beloved:
But the memories always seem to come to the fore. They come out inactivities of every day life, against one's will. Or as in the case of the novel, they manifest themselves in other subconscious events that are outof the survivor's control. The ghost of the baby Beloved, represents theterror of Sethe's past. It forces her to confront the events which tookplace upon her escape from slavery, and to come to terms with them in all their violence and reality
http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/Beloved-essays.htm (essay#11)
Using similar techniques, Morrison and Spiegelman construct a past and a present for their characters. They then use their created moments in time to examine the influence of one upon the other. The following essays will examine how the characters view the past; how the past is present in their lives; and how both authors created works incorporating these reflections.
Reflection
Reflection is essential to the creation of these books. The authors bounce back and forth between the past and the present as if they were two mirrors reflecting an image back and forth.
It is through these stories that humanity learns and lives. These stories are not told as they are written in books. They do not start at a beginning and then end promtly. Instead, the stories are brought on by the events of the present. They will be told as needed, with a story about yesterday to relate what is occuring today, needing a story about five years ago to explain what happened yesterday, and possibly a link in that story to something that struck the person a month ago. It varies from day to day and from story to story.
http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/218/projects/slattery/talking.htm
Unlike real mirrors, however, the images in memory do not remain sharp and clear. Images of the past can become distorted by time and by the individual's perception of the image or memory. Distortion through time and through people may create a double distortion through which the reader must sift. Such is the case with the Holocaust images in MAUS; they bounce between past and present and between Art and Vladek. How these images are viewed by them gives the reader clues to the unspoken thoughts of each of person. Morrison presented the reader with several people's memories of Beloved's murder to examine the effect of the past in the present. With this method, the reader could see how different perceptions of the same event were reflected in people's lives up into the present. For more on Morrison's construction of the past see Beloved constructed.
The Present reflecting on the Past
The Past reflected in the Present
Constructing a reflection