MAUS

what are four panels where vladek's character traits are shown ?

in chapter 1 and the book maus

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"In the whole camp was selektions," Vladek begins in the first panel of a four-panel block. "I went two times in front of Dr. Mengele." In the next panel, he continues to narrate his experience in the selections: "We stood without anything, straight like a soldier. He glanced and said: FACE LEFT!" At the same time, Vladek is shown abruptly turning a quarter turn in the image that accompanies this narration; in effect, he is performing his role in the selection for his son, Artie, who stands aside to the left of the panel an d watches the re-created spectacle, all the while recording Vladek's narration with a tape recorder that hangs from his shoulder. In the third panel of the sequence, Vladek continues to narrate his experience in the selections, quoting Mengele's order again to "FACE LEFT!" At the same time, he enacts the prisoner's compliance with the order, performing another obedient quarter turn. In the fourth panel, Vladek's explanation continues in a narrative box above the panel ("They looked to see if eating no food made you too skinny"), but here the survivor's reenactment of the selection during a walk through the country is replaced by a depiction of the original scene of the selection. Vladek is now no longer the aged narrator of a past experience, but the naked, emaciated prisoner who is first experiencing the scene of victimization and domination. He performs again a quarter turn, but in this panel it is not Artie who observes and records Vladek's story. Rather, a German camp official (according to Vladek's narra tion, Josef Mengele), a predatory cat to Vladek's hunted mouse, stands to the left and orders him to "FACE LEFT!" and at the same time records his evaluation of Vladek's physical condition on a clipboard. This last panel effects a visual break in the block of panels, for it suddenly transports the reader from a visual depiction of a present site of verbal narration of the past to a visual depiction of the narrated moment of the past itself. The visual seems to signify the abrupt chasm between past and present (a young, emaciated Vladek versus an aged, well-dressed Vladek), while Vladek's telling of the story appears to hold the two events together, linking the past and present in the process of narration. The comic book format of the scene, with its easily differentiated depictions of two separate temporal levels and two physical manifestations of the same character (young versus old), appears to clarify the disparities between the past and the present and to divide the two temporalities into distinct units i n a much more visceral way than narration." (1)

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http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-101859711/no-time-like-present.html