Background: While the experiences of Holocaust survivors have been represented in a variety of forms—from collections of letters to filmed documentary interviews to novelized accounts—Art Spiegelman’s graphic-style memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale marks a departure for Holocaust literature. Indeed, both the graphic-style medium and the use of animal figures to represent humans would seem on the surface to be incompatible with the horrors of the Holocaust period, given the traditional association of both forms with the “comic.” In addition, Maus’s focus on the relationship between Artie and Vladek and on events several decades following the Holocaust also provides a unique frame for the memoir. This assignment asks you to consider how these and other unique features of Spiegelman’s text contribute to his account of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
Assignment: Write a 6-10-page essay in which you advance an original claim about how one or more features of Maus contribute(s) to the text’s theme(s) regarding the Holocaust experience. This essay must contain a minimum of four body paragraphs.
Introduction: Begin your essay with an introduction that uses a hook and provides necessary context for your reader. The introduction should summarize the basic action and explain the most salient technical features of Maus and any additional information that you think is necessary; conclude with your thesis. Your thesis statement should ideally identify both the feature(s) and the theme(s) you intend to address.
Body: The best topic sentences will identify an aspect of the text and make a claim about how that feature contributes to the themes of Maus. Given the unique qualities of the medium, your evidence will be comprised of both the written and the visual components of the text; that is, you will quote and explain the words of the text—which take the form of dialogue, narration, and other internal written texts—but you will also analyze for your reader the relevant visual components of the scenes or panels you discuss. Thorough explanations of the words and images will be crucial to the success of your argument.
Additional Requirements: A) Unless you get explicit approval from me early in the drafting and have a good reason for doing otherwise, you must use evidence from relevant scenes in both volumes of Maus. Your interpretation must show your familiarity with the text as a whole. B) Your essay should include a reproduction of at least two visual images, which should be used as evidence and discussed in the essay. See “Citing Maus for instructions.
Getting Started: The assignment asks you to focus on “features” of the text. A “feature” includes virtually any definable aspect or component of the text, including the basic decisions that the author has made regarding the depiction of character, plotting, setting, style, etc. For instance, Spiegelman’s choices to use animal figures and the comics style are obvious textual features, but so are his decision to include himself in the narrative, to include the “Prisoner from the Hell Planet” cartoon, to begin with a preface showing a scene from his childhood, etc. Below is a list of questions that may help you to determine an aspect or aspects of the texts to focus on in your analysis; this is not an exhaustive list of possibilities. For each aspect, you should ask yourself, “How does this aspect of the text help Spiegelman to make a significant point(s) about the Holocaust’s causes and consequences?”:
1. What is the effect of using the comics-graphic style of representation to tell this story? Why do you think Spiegelman made this choice?
2. What are the effects of using animal characters to depict the different groups?
3. Why does Art provide a frame for Vladek’s account? In particular, why does he include depictions of himself as Art-as-Mouse as he interacts with Vladek and Mala in his father’s story?
4. What kind of a “person” is Artie depicted as, and why does Spiegelman portray himself this way?
5. Why does Spiegelman’s narrative depict both the old and the young Vladek? How does Spiegelman portray his father? How does the younger Vladek (as he appears in Vladek’s recounting of the Holocaust period) compare with the aged Vladek in New York? What is the meaning of the continuities and discontinuities in Vladek’s character?
5. Why is the “Prisoner from the Hell Planet” cartoon included in Maus? What does it add to the story that surrounds it (that is, the rest of Maus)? How are its images connected to images in the rest of the text? What is the effect of seeing this earlier comic’s different style in contrast to the rest of Maus?
6. What is the role of Anja in the book?
7. What repeated images or motifs do you see in the text (such as imagery of imprisonment, murder, the swastika, the moon, etc.) and what role do they play in the narrative?
8. What is one of the most moving, terrifying, perplexing, or disturbing “scenes” in the text? What makes this scene so moving, terrifying, etc? Why is this scene included and how is it related to the themes of the text?
9. How are violent actions depicted in the text? What are the effects of depicting “graphic” (violent, horrific) scenes in a “graphic” (comics-based) style?
9. Why does Spiegelman include the photographs of Richieu and Vladek in the second volume? How do these contribute to the book? What is the relationship between the real photographs and the illustrations of photographs in the text?
10. What is the role of the prefatory materials such as the epigraph (Hitler’s words) and the opening cartoon in framing the story of Vladek’s Holocaust experience?
11. What are the effects of the concluding images on the final page of Maus II?
12. Why does Spiegelman include the scene with the psychiatrist in Maus II?
13. Why does Spiegelman call attention (particularly in Maus II) to the difficulties that he faces in telling his father’s story?
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