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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Past’s Impact on the Present
Maus contains two storylines, one in the past and one in the present. The graphic novel frames Vladek’s story about surviving the Holocaust with a narrative that dramatizes Artie’s and Vladek’s relationship in the present day. The use of a frame story and the comic-book format allow Maus to highlight how the events of the past continue to reverberate into the present. As the text shifts between the present and the past, we often see panels from each storyline juxtaposed on the page, sometimes touching or intermingling with each other. The events of the past often stand between Artie and Vladek, preventing them from understanding each other. The comic structure helps to reflect this division, as when it inserts a panel with a scene from Vladek’s past directly between Artie and Vladek, who sit in the garden in the present. This visual treatment shows that father and son are literally divided by Vladek’s traumatic history. Those past traumas haunt Vladek, as demonstrated by a panel that shows the feet of hanged concentration camp prisoners from the past dangling above a car ride occurring in the present.
In the events of the narrative, we can see how the traumas Vladek suffered influence his behavior in the present. In the frame story, we see how Vladek is unable to waste food, such as when he insists Artie finish all the food on his plate and when he returns opened but unfinished packages of groceries to the store. In Vladek’s story of his history, he explains how little food they had during the war and what it felt like to starve. The traumas that haunt Anja were so significant that she ended her own life, again suggesting that the events of the past shape the actions that people take in the present.
The Question of What Makes Us Human
Maus tells the story of the Holocaust almost entirely through characters who are depicted as anthropomorphized animals. Ironically, the use of animals to represent characters drives an exploration of what it means to be human. The Nazi logic of the Holocaust relied on treating humans like animals, insisting that the Jewish people were no better than vermin. Maus, however, uses the comparison of Jewish people to vermin in order to illuminate the costs of such dehumanization. The mouse characters have simple cartoon faces, which often make them indistinguishable from one another. But those same simplified faces allow Spiegelman to emphasize the emotions felt by characters, highlighting their humanity by highlighting their anger and suffering. When depicting scenes in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, the use of mouse characters illustrates the effects of treating people like animals, drawing the reader’s attention to how people were treated as interchangeable and disposable.
Contrastingly, the cats representing the Nazi soldiers often appear vicious and angry, demonstrating that the violence they perpetrated against the Jewish people forced them to behave like animals as well. Maus thus suggests that it is not our physical appearances but rather our vulnerabilities that make us human, and that denying those vulnerabilities costs us our humanity.
The Subjectivity of History
Though people tend to want to believe that history is a collection of objective facts, Maus argues that all histories are subjective. Much of what we know about the past relies on individual people’s memories, which are unreliable. History is shaped by the details individuals choose to include as well as those they choose to leave out. Maus’s frame story acts as a symbol of this subjectivity by dramatizing Artie’s struggle to tell an accurate story. It shows him actively problem-solving how to draw characters, how to reconcile what he learns from history books with his father’s eyewitness testimony, and even how to draw a tin shop when he can’t find reliable historical sources that document what such a place should look like. Most noticeably, Artie’s decision to draw people as animals highlights that he is interpreting the story, not providing an objective recreation. Artie also mourns the loss of Anja’s diaries, which leads to all the stories about Anja coming from others. Her story is frustratingly incomplete and what details we have are filtered through people with their own motivations. Maus is a true story of what happened to Vladek and how Artie created the graphic novel. But Artie points to the artificiality of the story he tells when he states outright that “reality is too complex for comics.” In other words, we know Artie has simplified the story in the creation of Maus.
The Nature and Cost of Survival
The subtitle of Maus is A Survivor’s Tale. In the past, it tells the story of how Vladek survived World War II and the Holocaust. Vladek was often lucky, finding himself in the right place at the right time, but he was also extraordinarily resourceful. He traded on the black market, successfully disguised himself as a Pole again and again, and saved whatever he had, including cigarettes and bread, against future needs. He moved confidently, assuming he could meet any challenge presented. He successfully worked as a cobbler and a tin smith, providing him safety in Auschwitz, even though he had only observed these trades in the past. He showed others kindness, helping Mandelbaum in Auschwitz and his wife Anja repeatedly, and others showed him kindness. His story illustrates that surviving such an ordeal requires a combination of luck, other people’s kindness, and quick thinking. Maus undercuts his heroism, however, by also mentioning the many people that Vladek knew who died only because they were not as lucky. In an important conversation between Artie and his therapist Pavel, the two conclude that because there is no shame in having not survived there therefore nothing heroic about surviving in and of itself.
The randomness of survival was not lost on Vladek. He knows he was close to death many times over, and that trauma has made him an anxious and ungenerous man in the present. Though we cannot know why Anja was driven to suicide, the comic-in-a-comic Prisoner on the Hell Planet suggests Hitler was at least partially to blame. Anja’s suicide suggests that even though she survived the war and the Holocaust, she came out of it too broken to continue to survive. Survival, then, is not an act accomplished once but a continuing project with diminishing returns.
