Time is an Illusion? How Dillightful.

I guess one way I can start this blogpost, but greatly anger my audience (hi, Ms. Smit), is to talk about how both novels The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, and Maus, by Art Spiegelman, are both war stories. But to evade getting a zero, I will choose to write about how both novels play with time which I hope is a little more profound. In effort of telling these war stories, both writers choose to interject the present within the act of relaying the past which is not usually done in other books that I've read. They typically tend to stick to one time period which is probably always the go-to method when writing a novel. The clashes between time periods, however, seem to add complexity to the novel's plot and be more than just another war story. In Maus, Spiegelman begins his story with a brief anecdote of his childhood and then carries on to the beginning events of gathering his father's war story. In a way, the comic develops into a frametale. As the reader continues and learns about Vladek's experience in the Holocaust, he is exposed to Vladek of the past and present. This also occurs in The Things They Carried where the reader is living in Timmy's experiences and seeing how these events formed Tim who is brought in when the story shifts into the present. Both characters are obviously afflicted from the war with their similarities of an inability to be truly content and habits formed from the war (Tim O'Brien evidently carries a detached tone throughout the novel and Vladek refuses to throw things away which may stem from him having to be resourceful in the war). These effects are greatly enhanced with the juxtaposition of time and also offers the narrator to inject their own personal feelings about their history and layers two stories into one which is, in a way, interesting. (it's especially interesting in Maus with the cliffhanger of Art calling his father a murderer in anger of him destroying Anja's journals, a great resource for different viewpoints of the Holocaust).