Maus by Art Spiegelman

I think without question, Maus is truly a literary masterpiece. This novel is told in a past-present format, with the majority of the story taking place in flashbacks but it is still set in "present" day. I thought this was really interesting as were are not just seeing the events from Vladek's point of view, but from the point of view of his son, Art, who is dealing with the aftermath. I thought this was really important, as you are not just seeing a victim's point of view but how the Holocaust has a lasting effect on the people around Vladek. This tragic story was interwoven with familial issues and jabs. Its clear that Art and Vladek are estranged in real life, and it feels almost mundane compared to the retold stories of the Holocaust. It makes this connect and feel even more real and personable; the story is not being reduced to the typical, glorified events we see in media. This also highlighted the flaws in the characters like Art's frustration and guilt while dealing with his father, and Vladek's own prejudices against African Americans, even though he had lived through a prejudice based crime against humanity. Surviving such a tragedy did not mean that he did not style have flaws and I think it was important for Spiegelman to highlight this. A quote that really stuck with me in regards to this was "it wasn't the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was random!"

The use of animals to represent people was an extremely interesting concept to me, and it revealed itself to be more complicated than I initially thought. Prior to reading the story, I have known that the Jews were depicted as rats and the Nazis as cats. That is as far as I thought the metaphor was going. What I was not expected was how self referential and meta this metaphor would become. I was not expecting to see characters donning the masks of other animals and I was impressed by how simple but clever this was as a means to show the characters trying to blend in. The metaphor starts to come apart however, when Spiegelman has a conversation with his wife about what animal to make her, which just goes to show how inane this type of system of dividing is. Another interesting use of the masks is when Spiegelman is talking about his book and to his lawyer, they are both wearing rat masks, which seems to show that the metaphor goes beyond just the book.

The theme of guilt also thoroughly resonated with me. In the second part of Maus, Spiegelman makes his guilt apparent, depicting himself, donned with a rat mask, writing on his desk which sits atop the dead Jews that made the book possible. He also feels some guilt towards his father who, in his frustration, depicted rather harshly. There are also feelings of survivor's guilt from both Spiegelman and his father. Vladek obviously feels guilting for being one of the last of his family to survive. Spiegelman also expresses guilt and conflict in his telling of this story. "Its feels so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dream." This quote was critical to me. I feel like this perfectly expresses a lot of our understanding of history. For many people or at least me, knowledge of the Holocaust is a tragic abstraction of what actually went on. I can't truly conceive the events that happened, which is why I think Maus is such a brilliant work, as it depicts the history in a hyper personal account.