Bad Relationship

I decided to do my blog post on page 128 of the second book. It shows Art, Mala, and Vladek on one of the last days of Vladek's life. This page portrays the broken relationship between Art and his father very well. Firstly, this was the first time that Art has seen his father in about a month, even though Vladek has been very sick and his condition is starting to get a lot worse. Art's reason for this was that he had to "get over the Florida trip." It seems that throughout this book and especially on this page Art blames his father for their bad relationship, which calls into question the biased view on which Art wrote the book. This biased view contributes to the misrepresentations we see throughout the book. Art obviously has a very different view of this situation than his father and if his father wrote the story it would be portrayed very differently. However in this instance we only get Art's view of the story and him and his father's relationship.

On this page Art only comes to tape the last of his father's story. It seems that the only time him and his father get along is when they are talking about the war or the holocaust. It's the only thing that brings peace between them and settles their relationship. It seems as though the war is still deeply rooted in Vladek and most of his daily actions are determined by what he experienced during the holocaust ("The war? Yah, this I still remember." Even though Art seems like a jerk for not visiting his father except to tape his story, he may not be. Instead he may be trying to create a sort of memoir for his father the only way he knows how. This is not however evident in the book.

For these reasons I don't believe this book is factual. In order to study it many interpretations must be made. There are many emotional connections involved in the book which make it hard to know what really happened and what didn't. The bias of Art and his father's bad memory towards the end of his life contribute to the flawed view of history that we see in Maus.