Spiegelman V.S. O'Brien

The main similarity between Speigelman’s (Maus) writing and O’Brien’s writing (The Things They Carried) is that both often go back and forth between the past and the present. O’Brien is constantly referring to a past memory of a particular soldier or referring even to what is taking place for an individual post war. For example Jimmy Cross’s past interactions with Martha and Norman Bowker’s post war PTSD in the near future. In regards to Maus the story starts in a time period between 1978 and 1982 as the “present narrative.” The story then jumps to the past as Vladek tells the tale of his holocaust survival. In terms of differences the two works completely differ in terms of structure and somewhat in narrative. The Things They Carried is more of a stream of consciousness, full of symbolic nature in which items each soldier carries are carefully described to what they weigh as well as what they mean to each character, and what it may tell the reader about this individual and their fate post war. Maus is structured as a cartoon or comic book to first tell the story of Vladek’s holocaust experience as well as his relationship with his son. Maus is possibly the much more preferred story since the way it tells itself in the shape of a comic book is completely unique, since a personal tale of the holocaust is certainly not something I would expect from a comic book. That disguises itself in the form of mice and cats to describe the personal accounts of such a horrific and traumatizing sequence of events. The Things They Carried as mentioned earlier is more of a stream of consciousness which I have seen as the main narrative in dozens of other works. Spiegelman perhaps surpasses O’Brien’s writing in terms of creativity and originality.