SATIRE PICTURE

maus 2

Every year in school we seem to always be reminded about the Holocaust.  We hear the stories of the prison camps and how Jews were captured and killed there.  We again come to the same conclusion that you can never understand the holocaust without actually being there.  It’s hard to put into words to describe it.  Therefore, in Maus 2 Art Spiegelman writes his novel as a comic because of the fact that “a picture is worth a thousand words”.  Critics say this gives the literature a more positive quality.  The portrayal of humans in the book, are taken place by animals.  The two main animals are cats, played Nazis, and mice played Jews.  These two animals are natural enemies so, it was only right that the cats(Nazis) would not think twice about killing mice(Jews).  It is also said that the Nazis called the Jews the “vermin of society”.  This may have added to the reason why Art chose to portray the Jews as mice.  Furthermore, portraying the people as animals would rid the reader of any preconceived notions of human nature.  People may take it hard to except a novel when it is written as a comic book.  People think it is not a great way to write a fine piece of literature.  In Spiegelman’s case it works very well because it gets the reader’s attention and it give them another perspective to think about.  It does not make them think about the Jews perspective, but now it makes them think like a mice or cat.  It compares the Jews as mice, so it makes them seam that they are the “rats” of the world.  The Nazis are the higher intellects of the world.  They are the pure breed that they want the rest of the world to be.

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/218/projects/oliver/MausbyAO.htm

cats cradle blog

During the time of modernism, people looked for one thing..........the truth.  They wanted to know how this was made or if people we hear about in legends really existed.  Post-modernism is usually where people are given the truth and they have to decide now whether they choose to believe it or not.  They must put their own knowledge into consideration and come up with their own ideas.  This not just a personal thing, but also a universal thing.

In  Cat’s Cradle we see that this book is post-modernism because they are searching for a truth and they are given all this information, now they must put it all together to believe the “real truth”.  They can be given any kind of information and for all they know it’s fake. For example, San Lorenzo had happy people in it but it was full of lies, “ McCabe dreamed of making it a utopia” (Vonnegut).  We have already discussed this in class before.  Utopias do not exist, they just cannot be really made at all.  Here in San Lorenzo there are poor people on the island but they are all joyful of it.  They are told that people live like this, are happy.  The people do not know any better but to believe their leaders.  In our society we would want to know that there was a better way of living if people lived in poverty.  The thing is though, we do know of a better way of living, but some of us cannot change our status.  In the novel there are people who live in a better society, but they cannot share it with the people on the island because it would be useless.  They would just not believe all this blasphemy that is being told to them about the way they live.

END OF BNW

Reading this book was very challenging in the beginning.  I understood that the government was making embryos and they did like people giving birth to babies.  Then we had them saying something about life after ford invented the assembly line.  This is still a very confusing novel to me.

            I will be arguing that people have a hard time to except new ideas when they are influenced by a greater power.  For example, when the embryos are brought up as children they learn to do a job.  For the rest of their lives all they will do is do this particular job and love it until they die.  You one can tell them that their job is boring because they will simply not listen to them.  The government has done all they can so that outside influences will not affect them. 

            In my essay I will use the video by Sir Ken Robinson.  It reminded me of BNW right away.  He said something about education is like an assembly line.  I thought about the kids in BNW were learning things just like on an assembly line.  A job needs workers and then the government makes workers by teaching them what to do.  They are making workers and teaching them at the same time. 

            Another source I will use is Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  John makes a lot of references to Shakespeare’s plays.  Caliban was cast out of society and so was John and his mother.  They were put on a island and were classified as people who didn’t not follow the rules of society.  John was given birth by his mother.  In this world giving birth is discussing and against society.  The irony is making artificial kids is against the rules of nature and John is being excluded from the world.     

Video and BNW

The video was pretty good and I thought it was very similar to the principles of Brave New World.  Sir Ken Robinson makes the point that he believes we have a system of education that is modeled around the interests of industrialization.  In the world after Ford, that’s basically what the education system is like.  Kids are bred to do things that will help the industry and economy of the state.  Whatever is in need at the time, that’s what the kids learned to do.  He continues on to say that children are taught in batches and separated in different groups.  Furthermore, in the BNW the government separates the children into groups as well and a certain group can work harder than the other,” alpha children….work harder than we do”(26) .  Sometimes the stronger kids are put into one group so they can be supreme in society.  Sir Robinson wants us to go away from this sort of production line mentality.  We shouldn’t  separate children into groups because essentially they are all the same.  Children in our world get very bored about the things that are taught to them.  We have a new knowledge being presented to us but refuse to accept the information because we do not find them very important.  In Ford’s world a child will be given information and they will love it.  Also, they will be presented with new information also but, they will not take it in because they are trained to only know a certain thing.  They are ignorant of new information if it does not play into the skills they were given to by the government.  They do not know any better and will never learn a new trade.  If they are told to work in a factory, that’s what they’ll do forever.

CH 3 BNW

So far, we have reached an understanding of where the principles of life are different in the reality after Ford created the assembly line.  People are breed to do things that are seemed fit for society.  If they need to work then that’s what they love to do.

“Mothers and Fathers, brothers, and sisters…… but there were also husbands, wives, lovers….there were also monogamy and romance” (39).  From this quote we see that the kids of this world have not heard these words before.  Or they have and been taught that they are bad words or funny words that you only here in a certain class.  So, we can obviously see that the kids do not have mothers or fathers.  This is the manipulation of reality.  They have a “creator” not a loving mother and father that fell in love and reproduced the natural way of life.  They are playing with the circle of life.  They are playing “God” in a sense.  The desire of having a family will cease to exist.  You cannot reproduce so you will have an artificial family.  There will be no desire or passion for love.  A girl and boy cannot fall in love and want to have kids.  It’s not the way it works in this world.  There’s no desire to do anything fun or enjoyable.  People are programmed to do what the government sees as expectable.  If there is a shortage of farmers they will train kids to farm and farm every day.  It’s what they will love to do because they do not know any better.  The world itself would be manipulation.  They do not know if the rest of the world is like this.  They do not have the temptation to read a book or ask if this is really how people lived.

WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO????

In discussions of The Tempest, the traditional view is to consider how Prospero had taken over Caliban and the island just like the principles of colonization.  However, there may be other ways to think about this text.  For one thing, Stephen Greenblattt’s article “The Best Way To Kill Our Literary Inheritance Is To Turn It into a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order” explains that there is always a deeper meaning in works of literature that are drowned out by readers or critics who do not understand the true meaning.  Although, George Will contends that a writer has a predetermined notion about what his or hers writing will be and no one can argue that.  Therefore, taking these positions into account, we can see that they’re can be many different meanings of The Tempest.

We can say that people believe that Caliban is being ruled over by Prospero just like how the Europeans came over to the New World and took over the Indian’s lands without remorse.  George Will would say that this is the correct assumption for the play.  He would say that this is what Shakespeare wanted the play to be about but, of course we can never be certain now.  Other might say that maybe there’s another interpretation of the play, but under the principles of Will there can be millions but, the only one that matters is that of the one who wrote the master piece.

I would agree with Greenblatt.  Even though, it could be clear that colonization plays a factor but, I think Shakespeare has hidden a deeper meaning to the play.  I have no idea what it could be.  Once I start to analyze the text more. Maybe something will come up, but for now I believe that there’s more than just colonization.  Maybe there’s some sort of life lesson to be heard.