Art Spiegelman's Maus I and II: narrative and structure

Maus & NIght

Comparing and Contrasting Art Spiegelman's Holocaust Memoirs Maus I and II and Elie Weisel's Holocaust Memoir Night

Art Spiegelman's comic book-like illustrated stories, based on his elderly father Vladek's recollections of his parents' early life in Poland; their subsequent experiences at Auschwitz, and their later life in America, Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (1973) and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began (1987), and Elie Weisel's autobiographical first-hand memoir Night (1960), are, respectively, books about fathers, sons, and the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman's format and style of presentation, of the horrific stories contained within his innocently humorous-looking Maus comic books, however, are extremely unusual examples of Holocaust stories, while Elie Weisel's autobiographical memoir of the Holocaust follows a traditional format.

Characters in both of Spiegelman's comic book-like Maus books are depicted as mice (anti-Jewish World War II German and other European propaganda often compared Jews to vermin; it is from that inspiration that Spiegelman draws his highly ironic characterizations of Jews as mice in concentration camps (and their German (and occasionally other nationalities of) oppressors as pigs). Moreover, the entire concept of Spiegelman's Maus books (e.g., Holocaust stories in comic book form) is altogether an extremely ironic one. Elie Weisel's memoir Night, on the other hand, is a straightforward account, in traditional memoir form, of how Elie and his father (and their entire family) were taken by the Nazis to concentration camps during World War II.

At the end of Night, Elie, who is only 14 years old when sent to Auschwitz, emerges from his ordeal a person much different from his father: more realistic, more practical, and in many ways wiser about life than his father ever was. In Maus, Art, the son of a Holocaust survivor (just as Elie is the son in Night) is also a much different person from his father, although not due to any personal ordeals he himself has experienced, as Elie Weisel did during the Holocaust. Art was born in the United States, where his parents emigrated after surviving the Holocaust.

Eli was the only boy in his family (he had three sisters), but Art is an only child. However, Art lives in the shadow of a deceased older brother, Richieu, whom he never knew, and who was born in Poland but perished during the war years. Also, one of the major differences "between the lines," so to speak, between Elie Weisel's Night and Art Spiegelman's Maus books, is that Elie's experiences during the Holocaust make him feel separate and different from his father (even before his father dies inside Buchenwald after both father and son are forced to participate in the Death March between Auschwitz and Buchenwald), but Art, who feels distant from his father at first, feels closer to him after his father reveals to Art his parents' long held memories of the terrible World War II years in their (then) young and promising lives.

Before they and their families are sent to Auschwitz, Art's father is a practical young businessman, who is set up with his own factory by his prosperous and generous father-in-law. Elie's father is less practical and more of a dreamer. He is a spiritual leader of his community before the Holocaust, and as such, he often seems more concerned about his community than even his family or himself. Art's father, on the other hand, is a devoted and very demonstrative husband and father to Richieu.