Maus I and II

Paper Summary:

Analysis of Art Spiegelman's books MAUS I and MAUS II about what it means to be human. Plot. Importance of the family and of people helping each other. Concept of fate. Horrors of Auschwitz & the Holocaust. Book's comic book style and format. Characters of mice who embody the highest human ideals.

From the Paper:

"Maus is presented by its author, Art Spiegelman, in an unusual comic-book-style format. The form selected has a number of powerful advantages--it is a fresh approach to a much-told story, it humanizes and personalizes the tragedy much more than might a dry narrative, it feeds to the particular understanding of a visual society and a generation more attuned to the image than to the word, it may be a more palatable mode of presentation of such difficult subject matter for some people, and it accomplishes all of this in an ironic fashion, utilizing the methods of the comic book to tell a very un-comic story.


The mice in Maus are if anything more human than human beings because they embody all of the ideals that humans prize. This fact is heightened by these characters being portrayed as mice--the characteristics we see in them are not the..."

More papers on Maus I and II:

• Analytical Essay # 28623 : "Literature and History"
• Book Review # 73757 : "The Complete Maus (I & II)"
• Analytical Essay # 115185 : "The Entrance into World War I and II"

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