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As similarly suggested by Wally Hastings (1998), in his online article about Maus,
By distancing the reader from the experience, the talking animals enable us to bear the horror implicit in the Holocaust memory."
Art Spiegelman made use of different animals to depict the different nationalities in the story because he perhaps found that the use of animals is the easiest and simplest way to characterize the people in the Holocaust. For instance, he made use of the mice to represent the Jews. The Jews, similar to mice, can become weak and vulnerable victims. The Germans, who without heart had massacred the Jews during the Holocaust, was represented by Spiegelman as the cats; for the cats' malevolence characteristic, in which after capturing a mouse plays with it first then brutally killing...
Characterizing the different nationalities as animals, where some were represented by Spiegelman as endearing creatures while the others were offensively represented by unpleasant animals, may be Spiegelman's way of showing to the different nationalities in the Holocaust, and making them feel as well, how stupid and shameful it is to classify humans based on their race.
Bibliography
Hastings, Wally. Art Spiegelman's Maus. 1998. http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/maus.htm
Bibliography
Hastings, Wally. Art Spiegelman's Maus. 1998. http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/maus.htm
The function of myth in social cultures is explored by Mary Barnard in her the Mythmakers in which she investigates the origins of ritual in folklore, history, and metaphor. In addressing such a wide scope of material, she came to the conclusion that the origins of many mythical personas/deities related to a single familiar theme: intoxication (4). Her discoveries became offshoots of CG Jung's definition of mythology: Myths are original revelations of
Maus vols. I and II Maus: The 'cat and mouse' game of Art Spiegelman's Maus One of the most striking aspects of the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman by is the way in which it uses animal cartoon characters to illustrate one of the most tragic periods of human history. The animals create a visual expectation of playfulness that is undercut by the horrors the book chronicles. The victims of the
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
The problem occurred with the New York Times Book Review as well, criss-crossing the Fiction and the Non-Fiction Best Seller Lists (69). Spiegelman responded with a letter to the editor: 'if you list were divided into literature and non-literature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent that 'fiction' indicates a work isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author, I believe I might
Maus 1, Maus Art Speigelman's works Maus 1 and Maus 2 serve as an exploration of the father and son bond after an traumatic event, the Holocaust and how it influences relationships. These works act as a way to explore such stereotypes about Jews and the aftermath of the Holocaust especially exploring how it affects the next generation. Such a situation creates many dilemmas for the offspring of the survivors such as
Art Spiegelman's Maus II, a continuation of the story in Maus I, is part of a new approach to the telling of the story of the Holocaust. The form selected is the comic book format, and it has a number of powerful advantages. First, it is a fresh approach to a much-told story. Second, the use of the mouse characters interestingly humanizes and personalizes the tragedy much more than might