Maus

I find it’s funny that Spiegelman chose to portrait the Jews as mice and the Nazi Germans as cats. Cats are the predators while mice are the prey. That was the only relationship they had with each other. The Germans killed so many Jewish people in the Holocaust like they were nothing. Just like cats killing mice in people’s household. It could be seen as pest control by the Germans. The Nazis saw them as vermin who did nothing but caused all the troubles. I’m still pondering why Spiegelman chose to depict non-Jewish Poles as pigs. Depicting people of different ethnicities as different species is different from other novels. It is a troubling concept for many people to see but it is how many were judged throughout history, by the way they look not how they actually are as people.

It’s hard to tell Maus’ genre. It is a graphic novel but it could be a historical book, an autobiography, or a fiction. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five shares this with Maus. Other similarities are that they are both about WWII and the ‘present.’

Additionally, Maus shows a trouble relationship between Artie and Vladek. They don’t seem to get along very well. Vladek seems like the control type of person. Nothing can please him. He’s nick picking at everything Artie and his current wife, Mala, do. Maus also shows Artie’s fixation to his father. Mala was also a holocaust survivor but Artie barely talked to her and completely ignored her experiences. Artie only wanted to hear what his father had to say. I’m wondering why.

It’s also strange that most people think Vladek has PTSD. While it is reasonable to think that, some veterans don’t have that. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we don’t have to try to find things that’s representative of PTSD in the characters in books about wars.