The Loss Of Survival In Art Spiegelman's 'Maus'

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Art Spiegelman, the author of “Maus”, portrays the suffering and the survival that meant to be Jewish during the Holocaust by describing the experience of his own family as a graphic memoir. Vladek narrates moments of cruelty that he had to go through in the Nazi concentration camps where many Jewish people were targeted like him and his wife, Anja. However, he always had a survival instinct that made him found a way to overcome adversities. Even in the present time of the book, Vladek suffers when he remembers people that are not alive like his son Archieu, who was killed as a child, and Anja, who killed herself. These important events not only marked Vladek’s life but also Spiegelman’s. Somehow, by reviving the past, it seems that Spiegelman is also surviving some events that happened in his life …show more content…

The author uses allegory to represent Jewish people as mice, so Vladek thinks about how to sneak across the border to reunite with his family, so he came up with the idea to pretend to be Polish. “I still had on my army uniform, and I didn’t let know I was a Jew” (Second frame on pg. 66). In this case, Spiegelman uses symbolism by showing Vladek with a white pig mask on because he wanted to pretend to be Polish. The pig mask symbolizes Vladek’s purpose to go unnoticed as any other Polish in order to avoid of being recognized as Jewish. The frame shows Vladek facing back because he is talking to a train man, who is Polish, whose face that is represented as a pig is completely white and his uniform is completely black. The coat that Vladek wears has shading that goes from light to dark from shoulders to bottom in order in order for reader to

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