Very often the question has been raised as to weather or not Spiegelman was correct in portraying the Holocaust through cats and mice, and in class we summarized that it was fine, but only because he took it in a rather minimalist direction. The art style in Maus has relatively few flairs and extraneous details, something that no one can debate. Yet, I’d like to look into the text here. The story obviously has a very, very powerful retelling of the Holocaust and some rather complex issues between father and son. So if the power and complexity is not given to the audience directly in artistic detail is it seen in the dialogue and text? Or are many of the meanings and strengths in Maus gleaned from each reader’s individual sense of closure alone because of the range of thought allowed in somewhat simple art and reduced text?
Within the father, son relationship the reader often sees Art becoming increasingly angry at his father over a variety of things. At the end of Maus I Art shouts rather violently at his father for destroying his mother’s notebooks, calling his father a murderer, and actually ending the story after that single word. Why do you think that Art has such an extreme reaction to his father’s actions here, going out of his way to accuse his father of being a murderer over a set of journals?
-Karl
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