Argumentative Essay On Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Maus, is a two-part graphic novel about the journey of his father who is a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Throughout the novel, Artie’s father Vladek recounts the events of his life prior to and during the Holocaust. Art also displays his conversations with his father,displaying how the tragedy that he survived has changed his father in many ways most of them negative. Maus emphasizes the lifelong effects that a situation as drastic as the Holocaust has on the family dynamic, the importance of religion, and shows the benefits of visuals in a graphic novel. “Maus recounts the Spiegelman family dynamic in a brutally frank and honest manner.”(Berger 6) Anja and Vladek were Polish Jews from Sosnowiec and they fell in love with each …show more content…
He’s been in a constant battle to please his parents since he was a child. “His own troubled existence as an inheritor of their trauma.” (Berger 1) Alan Berger states that Art Spiegelman’s life is difficult being the second child of two Holocaust survivors. Richieu,his dead older brother, left a permanent scar on his parents after he died. Anja could never fully recover from the loss of her first child and as a result, she tried to smother Artie with maternal affection until he was completely sick of her overbearing nature. Vladek on the other hand was just blunt and spoke to his son as more mature than he really was. Religion also played an important, though subtle role in Vladek and Artie’s …show more content…
This is not him literally wearing a mask but it is representative of him hiding his true identity from the polish people who are represented as pigs. The idea of displaying different groups of people as animals shows the perception people had of them during this time period. “everyone knows what cats do to mice.” (Berger 2) The Jews were drawn as mice and the Germans represented as cats, effectively saying that the Germans were hunting,toying with,and exterminating the Jewish