One scene in Maus
really reminded me of The Things They Carried.
On pages 46-50, Vladek gets drafted into the war, but his father tries to
starve him so Vladek would fail his medical examination. He did fail the first
time but the second time, Vladek couldn’t deal with the starvation again and
ended up on the battlefield where he shot a man dressed as a tree. This is like
how Tim O’Brien drove all the way to the boarder of Canada only to give up and
go to war. And the tree man is like the Vietnamese soldier in “The Man I Killed”
that O’Brien’s character kills. However, Vladek is much less shaken about the
experience than O'brien is. Instead of staring at the man and thinking about what sort of life
he might have had, Vladek thinks to himself, “Well at least I did something”
(50). This difference in reaction probably has something to do with the nobility of the cause. While O'Brien never believed in the Vietnam War, Vladek was fighting for his freedom and that of his family.
This is exactly what I was thinking while reading. Both Vladek and O'Brien express the urge to escape and run away. However, in Vladek's case he would rather go through the hardships of war than whatever it was he needed to do to escape, i.e. starving himself. O'Brien calls himself a coward for going to war, and maybe Vladek is too in that he didn't have enough courage or guts to go through the detriment of starvation again.
ReplyDeleteI also made a similar connection when I read the part about Vladek killing a man. It's hard to draw a comparison since the validity behind O'Brien's killing is unknown. However, even the way that O'Brien illustrates the situation seems to say something about his feelings towards it. The way that he makes parallels to himself and his own life shows that it was much more than just a man that he killed or something to be proud of for that matter! Although Vladek does appear to be pleased with himself when he retrieves the body, he does portray hesitancy at the onset. He is reluctant to shoot when he asks, "Why should I kill anyone?" (48).