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Summary
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a graphic novel, and the characters in this story are depicted as anthropomorphic animals (animals that talk, dress, and behave like humans). The Jewish characters, like Artie, his father Vladek, and their families, appear as mice. The graphic novel alternates between a frame story showing Artie interviewing Vladek to write a comic book and the story that Vladek tells of World War II and the Holocaust.
The book begins with a prologue set in Rego Park, New York, around 1958. Artie explains that he was 10 or 11 years old and his roller skate broke while he was playing with friends. Those friends leave him behind and call him a rotten egg. As Artie helps his father Vladek saw some wood, Vladek notices that Artie is crying. Vladek does not comfort him. Instead, Vladek suggests Artie does not know what friendship is.
Chapter One begins around 1978, with Artie visiting his father Vladek in Rego Park, New York. Vladek looks frail and unhealthy; he’s had two heart attacks, and the suicide of his wife Anja (Artie’s mother) a decade earlier has taken a serious toll on him. Vladek is remarried to a woman named Mala with whom he constantly argues. While Vladek rides a stationary bike, Artie asks him to tell some stories about life during World War II so that Artie can create a comic book about them. Vladek resists at first, but then agrees.
Vladek’s story begins around 1935, when he is a handsome young man living in Czestochowa. Vladek tells Artie that many people thought he looked like the actor Rudolph Valentino; Valentino starred in a movie called The Sheik, which is where this chapter gets its name. A friend introduces Vladek to a young woman named Lucia Greenberg, and they date for a while, despite the fact that Vladek doesn’t have strong feelings for her. In 1935, while visiting his family in Sosnowiec, Vladek meets and is charmed by Anja Zylberberg, a smart, wealthy young woman. After Vladek returns to Czestochowa, he and Anja exchange letters and talk on the phone regularly. Vladek decides to end his relationship with Lucia. Lucia begs him to stay with her and sends a letter to Anja telling her that Vladek has many girlfriends. Anja is angry, but Vladek reassures her. He then moves to Sosnowiec and marries Anja in 1937.
The book shifts back to the frame story in the present day. Vladek asks Artie not to include the private details about Lucia in his comic book, and Artie agrees, even though he thinks it’s great material.
Analysis
The prologue introduces several themes that animate Maus: the difficulty Artie and Vladek have connecting as father and son as well as the long shadow the Holocaust casts over Vladek’s life. In the scene, Artie explains how his friends hurt his feelings, but Vladek is unable to comfort him and seems incapable even of recognizing Artie’s childhood pain. Instead, Vladek appears angry because Artie’s pain is insignificant compared to his own. Vladek suggests that Artie doesn’t understand what it really feels like to be betrayed by friends because he has never been locked in a room and nearly starved to death. The interaction suggests that Vladek does not believe in friendship, having been betrayed by others during the Holocaust.
The combination of Maus’s graphic novel format and the frame story allows Maus to visually illustrate how the past impacts the present. As Vladek begins to ride his exercise bike and tell his story, one panel shows Artie’s face in the background framed by Vladek’s arms in the foreground. Vladek’s concentration camp tattoo is visible. This panel illuminates how Artie’s life is framed by his father’s Holocaust experiences. As Vladek tells his story, the graphic novel flashes back to portray it. Periodically, we also see panels of Vladek and Artie in the frame story interspersed with events from the past. When these two storylines are juxtaposed on the page, the panels in the past have black borders around them and the panels in the present are left without borders. This framing device suggests that the story in the past is an artistic creation because it literally has a frame around it, like a painting in a museum. The two storylines are also simultaneously happening on the same page, pointing to how the Holocaust is a living issue for Vladek and Artie.
Throughout Maus, Artie insists on showing both the good and the bad of Vladek’s life and story. Even though Vladek asks Artie not to include the story of his love triangle with Lucia and Anja in the book, that story makes up the bulk of Chapter One. This story makes Vladek appear insensitive, because he abandoned his long-term girlfriend Lucia, and manipulative thanks to his long talk convincing Anja of his character. In the frame story, Artie argues for including it because it makes the story “more real—more human.” In other words, Artie insists on including a story that makes Vladek look bad because he does not want to tell a story that reduces him to a comic-book-style hero. He wants to tell a story that is true to life.
Maus is illustrated entirely with anthropomorphized animals, which paradoxically help illuminate the humanity of the story. In Chapter One, every character walks upright like a human yet has the face of a mouse. The drawing style makes it difficult to distinguish one mouse from another. Often the only difference between characters is in their clothing and accessories, such as hats and glasses. A strength of this simplified drawing style is that it makes the emotions of individual characters immediately apparent. When Vladek is angry, his eyebrows slant down in a dark slash. When Lucia is upset at Vladek’s leaving, her mouth is open in anguish. Artie says he wants a story that is “human,” and the style in which he draws all the characters as animals helps highlight their fundamental humanity.
