Spiegelman's Maus Through White's Eyes

A few things about White's view upon the narrative stand out to me. The most prominent of these is the final question he poses at the end of his essay. He asks, "Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?" Immediately prior to this point, he talks about objectivity in story telling and how he questions whether it is even possible to have someone tell a story without an underlying moral being there. I feel this arises out of the fact that we have opinions on everything. For instance, if you walk into a room with, as you think, no prejudices, you will instantly judge those around you. This may not be malicious, or even conscious, but it happens. Our previous life experiences are the building blocks of our judgments as well as the essence of who we are.

I gather from the reading of Maus that Spiegelman is aware of this and is attempting to do his best to be objective in his story telling. While there definitely is an underlying moral to the story, Spiegelman does a great job of humanizing both sides of the fight. First, he plays into the typical stereotype of an old Jewish man, with the money groveling and the general stubbornness. He also subvertly shows that the Nazi's are human by rarely showing any instances where a particular Nazi is committing any terrible acts. This is debatable of course, but it is my opinion and I feel that Spiegelman did a wonderful job of staying on the objective side of story telling.

One other point that doesn't really fit into this post is that of the scene on pg. 46-48 where the father's father starts out by starving his sons to keep them out of the military. Then there is the scene where the father does not want to kill anyone, despite the fact that there are people who are considered to be 'pigs' who are laying down there lives to protect the mice. Spiegelman portrays the Poles as 'pigs' for, what I gather to be, one reason. The Poles are not being directly persecuted by the Nazis and are giving up the Jews to them. The scene the Jewish father refuses to allow his sons to join the military is very disgraceful in my opinion. On one hand, you have Spiegelman showing that the Poles are pigs because they don't fight for the Jews, and on the other hand, you have the Jews not even fighting for themselves. I know this may have only been this one circumstance, but I feel it is extremely skewed to portray the Poles as pigs.