Animal Allegory In Animal Farm And Mickey Mouse

Maus is nothing like Tom and Jerry, though the rivalry between cats and mice are employed both in the Holocaust graphic novels and the American slapstick animated comedy. Animals, like dogs, cats and pigs, in fact, always appear in storytelling, from Aesop’s Fable to Orwell’s Animal Farm and Disney’s Mickey Mouse. The animals in Maus , seems to represent racial stereotypes, or namely national characteristics as the Germans cats preying on the Jewish mice in the Second World War. In fact, the animal allegory or stereotypes in Maus are being inconsistent throughout the narration. It is an ironic response to biased, over-generalizations and stereotypes of individuals based on ethnicity. In fact, these animals are not just “animals” representing

Such “essentialist assumptions” (Staub, 1995, p.38) is ridiculed by the juxtapositions of the real mice and cats and the fictional “mice” representing the Jews. In Maus, the character of not aware that they are represented as mice. Anja, who is represented by a mouse, is scared of the rats in the celler where she and Vladak hides (I, p.194) and the other survivor of the Holocaust, the Jewish (mouse) therapist, Pavel is a mouse keeping cats and dogs as his pets (II, p.202). As Staub (1995) mentioned, the speaking animals’ unconsciousness of knowing themselves as non-humans lead to an effect that they speak of the real animals as animals and they perceives themselves as humans without commenting how odd that they are represented by non- humans. This unconsciousness, can further imply that the so-called inborn ethnic essential traits, instead of being self-evident, are “frequently in the (less than clear-sighted) eye of the beholder” (Staub, 1995, p.38). For instance, in the second chapter of Volume 2, one of Vladak’s fellow inmates claimed that he is not a Jew, but a German because he has he medal from the Kaiser (the German word for “emperor”) and his son is in the German army as well. The prisoner, firstly drawn as a mouse, turns into a German cat in Auschwitz garb. However, when a guard stamps on his neck and kills him, he is again becomes a mouse again (II, p.210) and even at the end, when Artie asked Vladek whether he is a German are not, his “true” identity remains unknown or indeed, so trivial that does not deserve to be known, because after all, his ethnic identity is decided by the German soldiers, regardless of the “truth”. The other similar example is that the Jewish mice in the Gemeinde community organization who are in