Typhus Trouble

After spending another week on Maus, one page in particular stood out to me. In volume 2 on page 95 Vladek realizes he has Typhus in which he grows a mild case of insomnia by his disease always keeping him up and frequently sending him to the camps communal bathroom. He remarks on all of the not so lucky dead bodies that cluttered the floor and how he had to step on them to get across. Vladek truly believed he was going to die. His hope running on fumes as he explains, "Now I will be laying like this ones and somebody will step on me!" (Spiegelman 95) but Vladek's loss of hope wasn't what stood out to me, but the bodies in the final panel of the page. We are shown a close up of Vladek stepping on each individual corpse where we see the main three types of people there. More specifically the Mice, Pigs, and Cats. 

This interested me because throughout both volumes the idea of stereotypes, racism, and prejudice takes its hold on almost every character in the story who believe that their race is better than the other or one race is completely evil. Although that entire mindset is shown to be pointless after they are long gone, and in my opinion I viewed death and Typhus acting as a form of reality check for the reader. Are the things we worry about on the daily going to mean anything once we're gone? Or do our worries and dreams only matter because we give them life through constantly thinking of them. I’m going to go on a long shot and assume the majority of Nazi's believed that they were better than the Jewish population but in the end, the cat was lying there just as dead and dirty on the floor as the mice and pigs. 

We spend our days worrying about our reputation, and whether or not people like us, because that’s what matters right? Although "The world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self" (Wallace 237). Now I’m not trying to preach that we should all throw away our aspires for the future and start building homes for the homeless but this genuinely stopped me in my tracks and made me think. Labels mean so much to us that we let them define who we are and how we act, people pride themselves on being better than others whether its through money, clothes, social status, or even grades. I for one have had the "privilege" of baring witness to people using GPA as a comeback in an argument.

I spend my days worrying just about everything. "Who am I going to be?" "What am I going to do?" "What college will I go to?" "Crap will I get into said college?" these are just a handful of questions that drag race through my head keeping me up at night. And after reading Maus and This Is Water, I’ve been realizing that if I keep worrying as much as I do then my worries will consume me. I don’t have all of the answers right now and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yours truly 

-Connor