MAUS Essays

MAUS

In any artistic work, aesthetic style is a crucial aid to the viewer's understanding of the piece as a whole. Art Spiegelman's remarkable publication Maus breaks the conventional barriers of the past between comics and what were then considered to...

MAUS

Through the use of modulating points of view, Art Spiegelman pieces several stories into one in order to portray his father Vladek’s Holocaust story as well as his experiences with Vladek as he wrote the book. The conflict between Art and his...

MAUS

In Maus, Art Spiegelman produces what can be seen as a reaction to the Holocaust and its complicated aftermath. It is a graphic representation of the various horrors of the Holocaust and he chooses to make his characters anthropomorphic. One may...

MAUS

An element of tension runs through both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The two narratives running parallel to each other throughout Maus, namely those of Art and his father Vladek, converge at the end of volume two in a shaky synthesis. The two...

MAUS

While Art sits at his drawing board, a pile of emaciated Jewish bodies lies below him, seemingly unnoticed while reporters and businessmen climb over them (II.41). These bodies represent the grave nature of Art’s subject matter, the millions of...

College

MAUS

In “Maus II” by Art Spiegelman a series of three panels helps to encapsulate a continuous theme throughout the two part story. In these panels Artie and Francoise are in the car driving to assist Artie’s father who has just been left by his second...

12th Grade

MAUS

There is an enigmatic quality to Art Spiegelman’s survival guilt, a guilt which presents itself subtly in Book I and much more palpably in Book II. This ambiguity, so to speak, stems from a perplexing notion. That is, how could one of the only...

College

MAUS

Contrary to what some might think, the literary field of graphic novels tackles important issues such as gender, race, and religion. One work has stood out amongst the rest as a classicand revolutionary piece that has tackled one of, if not the,...

College

MAUS

The Holocaust was devastating to the Jewish community and millions died, yet some managed to survive. Among those which survived was Vladek, father of author Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman wrote Maus, a graphic novel about Vladek’s survival of the...

12th Grade

MAUS

Art Spiegelman is an author, an artist, a son, a historian, and a survivor of trauma. In his book Maus, he constructs a dual narrative graphic novel where he attempts to understand these roles in the context of the holocaust and in the context of...