My mood while writing this blog very late at night because of procrastination:

In the graphic memoir comic book Maus, by Art Spiegelman, the expression and illustration of the guilt emotions are shown both blatant and latent forms. Artie, which is a representation of the author Spiegelman himself, visits his father, Vladek Spiegelman in 1978 in New York City, and interviewing and asking his father to recount his experiences with extreme detail of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

During the storytelling, Vladek also reminiscences his experience of how he met Artie’s mother, Anja and her family. Vladek remembers his unimaginably horrible experience during the Holocaust that he went through. Among the amount of Jewish people that were captured, Vladek was fortunate enough to survive through the Holocaust, but with his life, he also brought along the “Survivor’s Guilt” emotion. Akin to Vladek, many Jewish people of his kind in the Holocaust were also either captured, tortured, enslaved, killed or unfortunately all of four of them combined. Each time Vladek manages to escape death, the comrades and companions aren’t as lucky as he is. As Vladek flees, around him, certainly to Vladek’s knowledge, are people who are being taken away or killed, while Vladek is unable to aid and support them as Vladek might dig himself a hole that we can not climb out of.

Though being able to survive and tell the stories of the Holocaust is a blessing for Vladek, he is also cursed with the guilt of being one of the 4% of Jewish survivors from the Holocaust. Vladek, like many other Holocaust survivors, often will reminiscence the events that occurred to them, and will frequently question their own choices, debating if they were the most ethical and humane choices, or if they could’ve acted on different way of approaching such situations, that could possibly save more comrades along with him.

However, Holocaust survivors aren’t the only ones experiencing guilt. Artie himself also experiences a certain kind of guilt called “Familial Guilt”. Artie personally feels guilty for his parent’s experiences of the Holocaust, and that he is unable to empathize the emotions that his parents must have gone through and is only able to express sympathy therefore not personally connecting the incident with Artie’s own emotions. The Familial Guilt gradually builds on itself as Artie’s bond with his own father isn’t the most sustainable and needs refinement. Artie realizes that he is just adding on the mental stress that Vladek already have a lot of, and can’t help but experience overwhelming guilt, and attempts to aid Vladek with any work that Artie can help with. Spiegelman is able to express more of his manifest emotions and what he felt like listening to Vladek reminiscing the experiences than Vladek’s own emotions, though it is still quite evident if closely analyzed.

Mood: Big Thonk

In contrast to the comparison between William James and Sigmund Freud, I believe that William James’ “Stream of Consciousness” would more accurately represent the idea of a person or self. In certain aspects, they do compliment each other and aid each other with similar general ideas, such as our unconscious minds are communicating through us in many different ways that we may not be aware of and how our flights and perches of thoughts are continuous and certain unethical thoughts often gets oppressed by social acceptance and certain social constructs. As well as how both psychologists support the idea of how our dreams are not solely from instincts and we still use our conscious brain to process all the information, and even creating the dream. An argument is that “everyone you see in your dreams are people you’ve seen in real life, as your brains cannot create and paint people just from ‘imagination’,” no matter if you recognize them in your dreams or not. William James’ theory of “Stream of Consciousness “ mainly focuses on our thoughts constantly flowing through our conscious mind, akin to a river stream that is always in motion. Arguing that “You never step in the same river twice”, indicating that the river stream goes on forever and never stops, just like your thoughts. Yes, even when we are sleeping, we are still using parts of our brains to think and to dream. He was the first to describe consciousness as a stream or a continuous succession of experiences. James also compares the “Stream of Consciousness” to a “bird’s life”, using the analogy of our transitive and substantive thoughts as the Flights and Perching of a bird in their lifetime. A bird is always either in flight or perched at a specific location, similar to how our thoughts are always going from one to another or focusing on one specific conscious thought. This example can be seen in Mrs. Dalloway, where the character Septimus, are often seen either perching by the thoughts and the flashbacks from World War I, and his flight of thoughts when he is observing his wife Lucrezia, and every single little detail about her. This represents a clear example of the transitive and substantive conscious thoughts. The “bird’s life” comparison supports his idea of “Stream of Consciousness” as the “states are always changing” and the thoughts are constantly unfolding.