Maus: A Survivor's Tale Art Spiegelman Quotes

Art wonders here if the memory of the Holocaust is enough to prevent similar genocides in the future. The scary part is that it may not be.

Art expresses his concern that he is turning his father into a stereotype. By placing this comment within the text, he is alerting the reader to avoid racial stereotypes themselves.

Like Quote #6, a playful poke at the limits of the animal metaphor. This isn’t the only area where a character has animal pets; the German cats use dogs to track down Jews in hiding, but according to the animal metaphor, dogs should be Americans.

Taking down his father’s memories and recreating them on the page may not just be a concern with artistic realism, but Art’s own attempt to connect with his father on a deeper level.

By editing his father in this way, we lose some of the “real”-ness that Art wanted in Quote #2. We lose his father’s unique perspective, his unique way of dealing with his past.

Vladek’s obsessive hoarding is similar in some ways to the work of recovering his memories and, more generally, the work of collecting Holocaust testimony. Vladek’s story is just one individual’s story, easily overlooked when history deals with the “great men” – Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler. But collecting these individual stories are critical to our understanding of the Holocaust.

These are questions that <em>Maus</em> doesn’t answer – and perhaps that’s the point.

You thought sibling rivalry was tough. Imagine competing with a <em>dead</em> child, a child so young that he died before he could do anything really bad or disappoint his parents by, oh, becoming an artist.

It’s ironic that Vladek, in Quote #7, talks about how “nervous” Art is, when Vladek himself is so neurotic.

Tellingly, Art depicts himself at this point as a small, child-sized mouse. He needs to come to terms with his relationship with his father in order to come into his own as an adult.

In “Prisoner on Hell Planet,” Art depicts himself as a prisoner jailed for “killing” his mother or contributing to her suicide. But in his last lines, he accuses his mother of murdering him and leaving him in prison to take the blame for…murdering himself. Is he saying that feeling guilty over his mother’s suicide is unrealistic, like feeling guilty over murdering himself? Is he lashing out at his mother, unable to forgive her for killing herself? Or is he taking the blame for everything – his mother’s suicide, his inability to help her is a form of murdering himself?

In a way, the whole book is about Art’s uneasiness with his father’s “estate,” beyond the material sense of the word. He’s also concerned with his father’s legacy in a broader sense, in the sense of a cultural tradition, and also in the sense of psychological or emotional baggage.

Art’s anger at Vladek’s destruction of his mother’s diaries is also sparked by some sense that Vladek contributed to Anja’s death by not being sensitive enough to her needs. But Vladek repeatedly mentions how he helped Anja survive through the years in his story.

Art expresses here a guilt that many children of Holocaust survivors might feel.

Add to Art’s guilt the fact that Vladek always seems to talk himself into a heart attack whenever he has one of his recording sessions with Art.

Many Poles had to wrestle with the issue of whether to help the Jews escape the Nazis. Mrs. Motonowa is kind to the Spiegelmans, but she does have a price.

An ironic statement, given the representation of characters as animals in the text.

Art’s use of a tape recorder (and inclusion of photographs) brings up the question of whether there are more accurate ways to represent the reality of the Holocaust. How can a comic compete with a tape recorder or a camera?

Ironically, it is his father’s story that inspires one of his most successful and critically acclaimed books.

Up to this point, Art has created art that he knows his father will never read; comics are a way for him to gain some independence from his father.