Essay on "Holocaust Frame Narratives Are Important Literary Tools"

Essay 3 pages (1000 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Holocaust

Frame narratives are important literary tools. They engage the audience by providing an anchor in the contemporary universe, a perspective to which the audience can instantly relate. In both Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, and in Yael Hersonski's Film Unfinished, a frame narrative is used and it serves a distinct structural and semantic function. The frame narratives in these respective works about the Holocaust help the creators represent traumatic events on individual personal, and on social and collective levels. The events depicted in both Maus and Film Unfinished are challenging to comprehend on a conceptual level, which is why their media formats are also nuanced and complex. Furthermore, both Maus and Film Unfinished challenge the audience to be engaged with history on a level that is beyond documentary evidence. Human memory is mingled with impressions, emotions, and other subjective material. This allows for the two works of art to resemble traditional memoirs and narratives even though they are not. A traditional narrative such as Ruth Kluger's Still Alive is simply another form of media, but the end result is the same: to help the audience come to terms with the varied experiences and perceptions of the Holocaust.

In Maus, the reader encounters illustrations that are not pretending to be documentary evidence at all. Although Maus is autobiographical, it is rendered in graphic novel format. This creates a dreamlike world for the audience, and can convey the trauma in ways that Art and his father, as well as other characters, could not do if they were forced to rely on photographs alone. There is other scenes in Maus, however, that do resemble the actual documentary evidence many readers will have already encountered or can encounter when viewing Film Unfinished. The scene in Maus is of the Nazis (cats) in a massive crowd for a Nazi rally. The scene invokes the mass consciousness of the German public at the time of the Holocaust. It asks readers to contemplate uncomfortable issues such as the willingness and readiness of the anti-Semitic populace to accept the Final Solution along with their party leaders. A similar scene, almost identical, takes place in Film Unfinished. Although unlike in Maus, this Film Unfinished scene of the crowd of followers is a piece of actual documentary evidence. Juxtaposing the real with the imaginary is a primary way that Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus is so successful; and displaying the real imagery of Nazism by showcasing the unbelievable complacency of the German people. Yael Hersonski does show that documentary evidence is fallible, however, which is ironic. The documentary evidence that the Nazis had was used to present an unrealistic and categorically false picture of the conditions of the Warsaw ghetto.

Therefore, both Maus and Film Unfinished are framing the Holocaust "outside of the purview of traditional academic scholarship." Their respective media are different, but the end result is the same. Moreover, these works of art can be viewed alongside personal memoirs of the Holocaust like Still Alive. Sometimes, the media… READ MORE

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