Maus Art Spiegelman Sparknotes

Grant Gronemeier

Mrs. Watts

AP English III

1 May 2014

Maus and The Holocaust: A Story Within a Story Author and illustrator, Art Spiegelman, in his graphic novel, Maus, effectively portrays the events of the Holocaust while also telling the intriguing survival story of his father, Vladek. Spiegelman’s purpose is to honor his father’s memory by accurately telling his story and to also inform readers of the main events that took place during the tragic time period. By using Vladek’s story to complement the timeline of the Holocaust, Spiegelman successfully tells two stories simultaneously. By writing Maus as a graphic novel in black and white, Spiegelman attempts to discuss the Holocaust while also trying to get across the point that it cannot be accurately portrayed. If he were to write a nine-hundred-page book trying to re-tell every event inside the Holocaust, he would not have been as successful. Everything is a representation besides the

Spiegelman included this in the novel to show the readers how inept he felt about writing such a book. He is fully aware that writing a novel trying to capture the true atmosphere of the Holocaust is quite difficult, so he is simply mentioning it to his readers. Within this section of the novel, Spiegelman says to his wife, “I mean, I can’t even make any sense out of my relationship with my father…how am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?...of the Holocaust?” (Spiegelman 14). Based on this, Spiegelman decides that the best way to tell his readers how he feels about writing the novel is to just put it in the book itself. He uses this method of self-evaluation to get across how he really feels about his novel and to show that he has no intention of attempting to recount all of the emotions, connotations, and events that occurred within the Holocaust, because he knows it is nearly