Summary Of Mein Kampf's My Struggleman

When looking at Mein Kampf (My Struggle) by Art Spiegleman and Resurrection by Frederick Douglas, it can be seen that although the audiences were different the stories being told were very similar in nature. The purpose of each story is to tell a story, which is why both authors used narration in which to do so. Narratives are usually very sequential in nature. Using narration when telling a story helps to draw people into the story and yet still get a message across in the end. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Spiegleman narrates a story about his personal struggle with his artistic vision, specifically how he struggles to find a new topic when a 5,000 pound mouse is breathing down his back. Spiegelman narrates his own sequences of events that he goes through when trying to come up with something to writer about. Near the beginning he claimed that he didn’t know anything, but as he continues to go through his memories, one can see that he really knows a lot of things. It is how that he connects to the
things that he knows that shapes the person that he is. Making these connections will give him things to write about, while not making them will make him feel like he has a 5,000 pound mouse breathing down his back. Spiegleman mentions in his cartoon that both of his parents were survivors of the holocaust which influences him more than he knows. In his trip down memory lane he is truly searching for a safe place that he could encounter his parents and their horrific experiences and while at the same time find a way to define himself as an artistic and a writer. Spiegleman needed to connect to his memoires in order to define himself so that he could put the past behind him and move on.

In the Resurrection, Douglass narrates a story about his personal struggle of being a slave. His narrative account of what happened to him while he was a slave enabled him to make the transformation from slave to independent human being, according to him. It is the connection that he makes between what has happened to him already and what can happen to him in the future that gives him the will to get through the many things that he had to endure along the way.
Douglas’s intended audience was overwhelmingly white and more importantly Christian. Throughout his Narrative, Douglass critiques some of the religious practices in the South, in order to show the unkindness as well as insincerity of slave-owners but Douglass is intentional in saying that he is not attacking Christianity as it’s ‘properly’ practiced. Douglass portrays himself as a strong Christian, giving examples as to how he teaches Sunday school to his fellow slaves. Douglass uses religion as a way of hanging on to something good amongst all the bad that he was suffering. During his narrative tale, Douglas goes through the sequential events that led him to the point where he knew that he couldn’t take anymore.
Once he got to that point he rebelled against Mr. Covey and it was this rebellion that gave him the determination that he needed to survive and be free. It was these events that took place in life that made him the person that we was. These events shaped him and in the end shaped his future because they gave him the drive to go on and become something great. This was the message that Douglas was trying to get across when writing this piece. No matter what adversity that you face there is always a way to gleam something good from it and turn it into a positive. It is just what you do with it that matters. Everyone’s lives are shaped by different things and different events and it is what people learn from these and what they take away from them that give them the determination to go forward and still do great
things. Although these two pieces were similar in that they both told a story there were also very different in many ways. Both authors narrated a story about a sequence of events that were very important to them and in the end shaped both of them into the people that they were. One different that can be seen between the two is that in Douglass’s case he was relating his story to a historical period of time in which he actually lived through. He was born and slave and grew up a slave and therefore was very intimate with the subject matter. Speigleman on the other had drawn a connection between his work and an historical event – the holocaust, an event that he did not experience firsthand. His parents were holocaust survivors, but this would have been something that Speigleman would have only known about second hand. So although both pieces were narratives there were not exactly the same types. Both pieces were an attempt to tell a tale about how they discovered a part of themselves. Both uses narration to tell their stories and yet both did it in a very different way. Spiegleman used a narrated cartoon in which he showed his struggle with finding himself by looking at his interactions with his parents who were holocaust survivors. Douglass on the other hand recounted a very personal experience that happened to him and showed how it was that this experience changed his life. Both of these pieces are very strong in that they show how human strength can prevail in almost any situation and how it is that human beings have a tremendous fortitude to be the best that they can be, regardless of the circumstances from which they have to endure.