...shows the materiality of Spiegelman’s archive; it is about the embodiment of archives. The subject of Maus is the retrieval of memory and ultimately, the creation of memory…. It’s about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing. Those are the things that give real tensile strength to the work—putting the dead into little boxes. – Art Spiegelman (MetaMaus 73) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a book about archives. And the book about making Maus, MetaMaus, is both a process of taking stock of the Maus archive and an active process of creating a new archive.1 Maus is about the Holocaust, featuring two intertwined stories: that of Auschwitz survivor Vladek Spiegelman’s struggle in the 1930s and 40s in Poland during WWII, and that of his son Art...
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...8th period English Analysis Essay for Maus We have all evolved from animals, and even though as humans we are more complex, we are also very similar. In the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegleman, Art chooses to illustrate humans as animals. He portrays different classes and religions as different animals. This impacts the story in a positive way because it deepens the understanding of the characters and also further separates the classes and religions. By using animals instead of people there is an implied background of the nature of that animal which lets the reader have a fuller understanding of the character’s personality and traits. They also widen the gap between the groups by showing the natural hierarchy of the animals. The choice to use animals instead of humans was a positive addition to the story; animals were used in their most simplistic form so the traits that they were given during the time of the holocaust could be more easily understood. An illustration demonstrates this concept by having a Jewish family hiding in a bunker inside a garbage hole. Presented as mice, they were hiding in a hole underground that was filled with garbage, showing that they were cowards and dirty creatures. There is also another illustration where they are hiding from the Nazis, who are portrayed as cats, by crawling through a tunnel, like a mouse hole, to escape into another area. This also shows their sneaky and cowardly actions. Another way in which the...
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