Metaphors In Maus

Maus tells a story of Spiegelman’s, Vladek, and his experience as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s Maus gives us a detailed look at the ways Jews were persecuted in German-occupied territories during World War II. The Jews were seen as inferior, disposable and deprived of the most basic human rights. Instead of drawing the characters as human, Art Spiegelman, in his graphic novel Maus, chooses to merge the different identities and draw each character through a definitive scope of animals: Mice were used to represent the Jewish people, cats to represent the Germans, pigs to represent the people of Poland and dogs to represent Americans. He uses metaphors which are figures of speech that is used to make a comparison between two things that aren't alike but do have something in common, in this instance animals. Mr. Spigelman strategically chose the animal characters and had a stereotypical relation to the character the animals depicted in the story. Mr. Spiegelman convincingly argues that he was using “Hitler’s pejorative attitudes against themselves,” and that using animals “allowed me to approach otherwise unsayable things” (Gardner 2011, p 2). There are many times throughout the text

The American dogs saved the Jewish mice from the German cats. They were depicted as friendly and helpful, as soon and the Jewish mice saw them they knew that the war was over. Vladek speaks to an American, depicted as a dog who has come to Liberate him. “This house will be apart of our base camp but i guess you boys can stay the joint clean and make our beds”. The metaphorical role of the dogs being Americans and nice implies that they were the ones who had sympathy on the Jews and saved them from the Germans. Americans are seen as people above the others and are treated as saviors, that is where Spiegelman’s ideas for dogs fits the character it