Aswin

I have read many graphic novels, mostly comic style books when I was younger about superheroes like Spider-Man and Superman that made me think graphic novels were always childish and couldn’t mean anything. But when I read Maus, my opinion changed. I never knew that a graphic novel could have such a deep meaning and could be very powerful. The book revolves around the harrowing narrative of the Holocaust with a complex father-son relationship that depicts the terrors of a Holocaust survivor better than history books or documentaries. Spiegelman achieves that by using a combination of motifs, rhetorical devices, and visual elements. For example, a prominent motif is the use of animals to represent different ethnic groups, with Jews portrayed as mice, nazis as cats, polish as pigs, and Americans as dogs. This motif emphasizes the predator-prey relationship in the Holocaust such as mice getting tortured and killed by cats and the cats being feared by the dogs. Visual elements such as the ...

  Maus is rich with motifs. Each page is filled with them, when analyzed, conveying a deeper meaning. For example, the page after 101, in the first page of the comic “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” written by Artie, the page has a photo of Anja and Artie when Artie was young boy . This photograph shows us that that though the characters are presented as caricatures inside the comic, they are, in fact, real people this also goes bac Maus k to the animal metaphor, throughout the book, characters are depicted as different animals depending on their races(rats as Jews and cats as Germans) but when seen as people, they all look the same and have no differences are all equal other than their “races”. Also on the first page, we can that Artie is wearing a prison costume with black stripes which might suggest that Artie is imprisoned by his mother’s death and trauma. In later pages of chapter 5, we see Artie and Vladeck go to the bank where have conversations about inheritance, but in t...