Animal Farm and Maus

In the first place, Spiegelman's book deals with actual events, not only actual historical events but events told the author by his father about his father's personal experiences as a prisoner in Hitler's concentration camps. The reader might be put off at first by the depiction of Jews and German Nazis and Poles as mice, cats and pigs, but the underlying brutal, heartbreaking human reality of the horrors faced and survived by Spiegelman's father finally has a powerful impact on that reader.

On the other hand, Orwell's portrayal of a farm taken over by animals and gradually slipping into corruption and abuse of power is a theoretical portrayal, an abstract fictionalization of horrors occurring in Stalinist Russia. While Orwell must be praised for his effort to show the dangers of totalitarianism, and while it certainly has achieved its rightful place as a literary classic because of its originality and significance, it simply did not have on this reader anything like the emotional impact which Spiegelman's book had.

Again, this is in part due to the actuality of the events portrayed in Maus. We are hearing step-by-step the terrible experience of Spiegelman's father and mother and others as they were

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suffered by Mandelbaum, and by his pleading prayer: "My God. Please God . . . Help me find a piece of string and a shoe that fits!" However, as Spiegelman adds by way of commentary: "But here God didn't come. We were all on our own" (Spiegelman II; 29). Again, the importance and courage and prophetic nature of Orwell's book cannot be overestimated, but comparing the two works in their overall impact on this reader, Spiegelman's book is simply the more powerful by far. To be fair, at the time of Orwell's writing, the full impact of Stalin's totalitarianism on the people of Russia was not yet clear, whereas by the time Spiegelman wrote his book the Nazi-created horrors were well-documented. Another reason for this impact is the humanization of the animal-humans by intercutting the past and the present. We come to see---in the scenes of the present---the little human flaws and shortcomings of all the characters, including the author, his father and mother, and his step-mother. In other words, Spiegelman does not draw his characters in largely black-and-white terms, as does Orwell. The animals in Orwell are simplified caricatures, designed to carry the ideas or concepts of what it means to be a victim and a victimizer. The animals
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1657
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)