Use Of Animal Imagery In Maus By Art Spiegelman

In his two volumes of Maus, Art Spiegelman chronicles his father, Vladek’s, past from before the second World War to the end of the war while illustrating his present-day conversations with his father. Interestingly, all the characters’ are represented by human beings wearing animal masks. The Jews are wearing mice masks, the German are represented by cats, the Polish are pigs, and the French are frogs. The first volume begins with a quote by Hitler, where he claims, “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” Spiegelman’s choice of beginning his book with this quote and using animal imagery to depict the people in his story is necessary and important because it forces the reader to understand the Nazi ideology concerning race and its effects on humanity. Through animal imagery, …show more content…
The actual animals serve a distinct purpose; they jolt the readers into remembering that the human beings depicted with animal masks are not distant characters in a story but actual people who lived through the monstrosity of the Holocaust. An example of this is when Vladek recalls the death of his neighbor’s dog comparing it to one of the prisoner’s death, “‘How amazing it is that a human being reacts the same [way that the] neighbor’s dog,’” (Spiegelman 242). On the same page, Spiegelman illustrates the prisoner rolling around in pain and dying and in the panel below it, illustrates the dog doing the same thing. The similarity is jarring. It removes the distance between the reality of these characters and the readers’ desensitized minds. By placing real animals in the narrative, Spiegelman has invoked reality in the readers’ heads, reminding them that the Jews were forced to wear these masks of inferiority and indication as prey. Thus, Spiegelman uses actual animals in his narrative to compel the readers to understand the reality of the