Compare And Contrast Night And Maus

Aidan Williams
Ms. Eglitis
Honors English 2
3 May 2023
Compare and Contrast Monsters are only supposed to be in fairy tales, right? Night by Elie Wiesel and Maus by Art Spiegelman both tell shocking stories that prove that humans can sometimes be the scariest monsters. Night is the story of a Jewish teenage boy living in Hungary during the 1940s. Wiesel tells the horrific story of being sent away to Auschwitz. Maus is the graphic depiction of Vladek Spiegelman’s life as a Polish Jew in the 1940s trying to escape the Nazis. Night and Maus have many similarities and differences regarding style, genre, and structure. Night and Maus have similar styles because they both use figurative language. In Night, when Weisel is finally freed, he looks in the mirror for the first time in years. He says, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (Wiesel 115). Obviously, he was not a real corpse, this was a metaphor. He was saying that the experiences he had to endure in the concentration camps changed him into a corpse-like man. This style continues in Maus. Vladek’s girlfriend Anja had been accused of hiding translated communist messages. Vladek told his son that “the police went over [their] house top to bottom” (Spiegelman 28). This is a hyperbole, an extreme

This is seen in the initial reactions to discovering who the Nazis were. In Night, Moise the Beadle describes the Nazis to the Wiesel family. Wiesel stated, “We were stunned, yet we wanted to fully absorb the bitter news” (Wiesel 13). He uses formal language and wording such as “stunned” and “bitter news”. However, in Maus, the initial reaction to the Nazis is slightly more casual. Vladek exclaimed, “Let’s hope those Nazi gangsters get thrown out of power” (Spiegelman 33)! This is notably a less formal way of commenting on the Nazis. Referring to them as “gangsters” is a more casual way of thinking of