The Past In Art Spiegelman's Maus

The Holocaust is the name of the time period when so many Jews lost their lives to the Nazi party until Adolf Hitler. Many survivors share their stories of what happened firsthand, while the stories of others are told by their children. Art Spiegelman is one such child whose parents both lived during the Holocaust. In his graphic novel Maus, Art illustrates and writes his fathers’ experience during the Holocaust in the past, and also his experience with his father in the present. The illustration on the back flap of Maus portrays Artie’s attempt to reconcile his father’s past and his own present through the use of imagery and symbolism of both times.
Both Artie’s past and his present are filled with his father having memoirs of the Holocaust. His father Vladek, is frugal, “waste not, want not” as during the Holocaust food was scare, so Artie had to eat everything on his plate during his childhood. On the back flap of the novel, it depicts Artie as a human wearing a mouse mask while inside the novel, all the characters are portrayed as …show more content…
The poster behind Artie also has a specific meaning in the words written upon it, “Now it’s safe for adults to read commix...or is it?” these words can correlate to Artie’s illustration of “Prisoner on Hell Planet” on page 100, in that illustration is depicted his mother’s suicide and his emotions afterward. The words on the poster can be reference to when he wrote it; he didn’t believe that his father would see it because he wouldn’t read an underground comic, but ultimately his father did see it. With the last panel of Maus having Artie call his father a murderer for destroying his mother’s journal, the illustration on the back flap can be seen as when Artie returned home that night to work on his novel, he is pensive, struggling to connect everything, and attempting to come to terms with his mother’s suicide and father’s