Maus I And II Analysis

Maus and its sequel Maus II are among the most significant graphic novels to ever be published. They are semi-autobiographical tales about the author and his father, a Holocaust survivor. Art Spiegelman attempts to capture the psychic and physical horrors of the Holocaust in a way that transcends documentary evidence as well as mere fictionalization. Desensitization to the issues of mass murder has permeated popular culture, to the point where it becomes necessary to distance the horror entirely from the human experience and depict humans as animals. This way, Spiegelman acknowledges the problem of documentary evidence, the persistence of memory, and the subjectivity of personal experience. Maus is effective because it uses a unique medium, the graphic novel, to capture a uniquely macabre event in history.

As the subtitle of Maus I suggests, the story is not just about Spiegelman's father. "My Father Bleeds History," the subtitle reads. The imagery of blood is unsurprising, but this subtitle also shows how the graphic novel has a frame narrative. Spiegelman wants to document his father's final memories of the Holocaust, but in order to do so, Art Spiegelman must contend with the tremendous gap that exists between him and his dad. As the first person narrator, Art admits, "I hadn't seen him in a long time -- we weren't that close," (11). Establishing the difficulties inherent in the father-son relationship, Maus therefore works on multiple human dimensions. This is not a preachy graphic novel about good vs. evil, using the Nazis as the obvious embodiment of evil. Maus is also about human relationships and inter-generational conflict. It is about cross-cultural communications as an American son tries to relate with his father who remains stepped in Old World values. Furthermore, Maus is about the ways collective tragedies like genocide impact individuals. The Holocaust has an impact not only on the Jewish diaspora and the sociological dimensions of Jewish life and institutions. In addition to impacting Jewish social and political life, the Holocaust has had a bearing on family relationships. The ability for the father to come to terms with his own guilt and his feelings about his wife's suicide play a major role in the unfolding of the Maus plot. Traumatic stress has caused the father to shut down emotionally and close off his heart to his son. The fact that he has had two heart attacks -- exposed early in the novel -- underscores the way genocide strikes at the "heart" of personal, as well as collective, identities.

The subtitle of Maus II is "And Here My Troubles Began." Ironically, Art Spiegelman refers to the period from "Mauschwitz to the Catskills and Beyond" as being the "beginning" of his troubles. Thus, the author continues to flush out the theme of personal psychological and social impact of the Holocaust on Jewish individuals and families. Vladek, his father, is not the easiest character to like. He leaves a message saying he had a heart attack just so his son will return his phone call. His being a survivor is often the only element of sympathy Art can offer him, and yet as the novel unfolds, it is clear that Art comes to understand the motive for his father's destruction of his mother's journals. The desire to erase the past is a recurring theme in Holocaust literature, which is ironic given the fact that Holocaust literature is an act of remembrance. An internal struggle between the need to remember and the desire to forget ensued within each survivor. Vladek cannot help himself, as he fails to come to terms with his own grief. The existential element of his grief is that which is ultimately incomprehensible. No one can understand the impetus for the Holocaust, and likewise, no one can understand what it might be like to experience and survive the Holocaust. Because Anja has committed suicide, Vladek feels an extra burden upon his soul.

Art is determined to provide a record of his father's life, so that all may remember the Holocaust. His father struggles with the memories, and he goes so far as to claim, "No one wants anyway to hear such stories," (12). Art knows nothing could be farther from the truth. In spite of the fact Art has a strained relationship with his dad, he continues to chronicle what little remains of Vladek's memory. There is a healthy dose of dramatic irony in the Maus books, as the author self-reflects throughout and speaks self-consciously about writing the "comic strip" and wishing he were right there "in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through," (16). Of course, Art Spiegelman does not genuinely wish those things, but it is admirable that the author manages to be a narrator that leaps out of the page. He is at once reliable and unreliable: he does not want the audience to suspend disbelief in spite of the fact that his characters have become mice. What Art Spiegelman does want is for the audience to understand his motive for writing the books.