"Maus"

Paper Summary:

With powerful texts and illustrations, the book tells the story of the author's father Vladek during the Holocaust as a Jew. The paper discusses how the novel's status as a pictorial or graphic novel is especially memorable for the reader's and viewer's consciousness, because it forces the reader of "Maus" to identify with the image of a despised animal as well as a persecuted 'race,' particularly in the form of Vladek. The writer focuses on the character of Vladek an how animal symbolism is used throughout the novel.

From the Paper:

"Yet, brilliantly, despite this rakish quality of Maus' father Spiegelman the mousebreaker of hearts, and the dual historical resonance of mouse victim and vermin, the author also is able to make use of the childlike and storybook quaintness of having mice as protagonists, along the lines of a bedtime story. "Poppa," Spiegelman calls his father, and initially the two of them together seem like 'A Mouse and his Child,' a story tale or nursery rhyme rather than two men trapped in a larger history neither of them can fully comprehend, on an emotional, theological, or literary level of narrative. This whimsy deflates some of the womanizing of "The Sheik" as the framed device of the comic book reminds the reader and the gazer that this takes place in an old man's memory, and might make him seem more successful with women than one might initially suspect."

More papers on "Maus":

• Analytical Essay # 24354 : "Maus I and II"
• Book Review # 95000 : "The Motivation and Intent Behind "Maus"
• Analytical Essay # 27601 : "Art Spiegelman's "Maus"
• Analytical Essay # 9167 : "Maus II"

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