My Spin on Vladek's emergent head (77.7)

At the end of class today, someone (forgive me for forgetting who) pointed out that in the last panel on page 77, Vladek's head and shoulders pop-up to provide the narration in a manner somewhat consistent with the original "Maus" cartoon. This is the only time in Maus that Spiegelman goes for this specific effect, but there are countless panels in which he gives us full frame shots of Vladek in the present providing retrospective commentary on the scenes he is describing (for example the bottom panel on 86: ('We didn't know yet of Auschwitz - of the ovens - but we were anyway afraid.")

So why the decision to include this abbreviated depiction of present day Valdek within the historically rendered scene on 77?

"Of course I said I only got half of what I really made. Otherwise I wouldn't save anything" present day Vladek says, but the Vladek of 1940 isn't saying anything in this panel. The narration, therefore, indirectly and retroactively puts words into young Vladek's mouth. I don't intend this to be a full explanation, as there is another factor to take into account: In additon to Vladek's head and shoulders being visible, we also see the handles of his exercise bike, an image that will take on greater significance as the chapter progresses.

In chapter one, when the bike is first brought into play, the reader might not take it as anything more than Speigelman's loyalty to accuracy. That is, if Vladek told him the story while riding on an exercise bike, why not commit it to paper that way. In chapter 4, however, greater attention is paid to this device, giving its use a ring of artifice. Upon completing his story about the last time seeing his father, Vladek is tired, which Spiegelman shows by cutting back to the present and depicting him hunched over on the bike (91.8). On the very next page, he says "Whoo - I overdid a little. I'm feeling dizzy" (92.1). Ostensibly, he's referring to the exercise session, but the implication that recounting history has exhausted him is impossible to ignore.

There also seems to be some significance that his chosen mode of exercise doesn't get him anywhere. Which brings us back to page 77. Here, the sly thriftiness that current Vladek describes did in fact get him somewhere. It was perhaps only through his frugal means of saving that Vladek kept enough money to bribe his way toward survival. On the other hand, here is an instance where Spiegelman is not resisting "caricature of the miserly old Jew" and is thereby spinning his wheels without getting anywhere.