Art In Elie Wiesel's Maus II

The beginning of Maus II starts with Art contemplating as to how he should portray his wife Francoise, a French woman who converted to Judaism upon marrying Art. Specifically, Art chooses to open the second volume of Maus by describing his agony over how to depict his wife because he wants readers to understand that not everything is “black or white,” and it certainly is not easy to categorize human beings. However, in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, this would have been much easier—essentially, you were either a Jew or you weren’t and, if you weren’t, you were either German or Polish. But, in modern eras, individuals aren’t as strictly defined by one characteristic. For example, Francoise is French, but she is also Jewish and she identifies

Specifically, this can be seen by Art’s suggestion to first portray Francoise as a frog, but then magically have her transform into a mouse after visiting a rabbi and converting. Once again, this conversation shows that, in World War II Europe, everything was “black or white,” which is why volume one was so easy for Art to illustrate, for individuals were either Jewish, German, Polish, or whichever nationality they were. But, as things became more “gray” as time passed on and individuals weren’t strictly limited to being only one thing, Art’s animal metaphor began to see its limitations, as seen with his agony regarding how to portray his French and Jewish

Specifically, Art confesses that, “I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through!” (Spiegelman 16). This shows that, while turning his father’s experiences into a novel, Art himself is also using Maus as a means of finally bettering his understanding of both of his parents and the atrocities committed during World War II. Overall, this conversations reveals that Maus is both an account of a survivor’s tale of the Holocaust and also a story as to how the journey of making the novel helped Art himself make sense of everything that had happened in his parent’s lives. Furthermore, readers are also given the impression that Art is correct in stating that his undertaking of Maus is rather presumptuous. Specifically, Art himself states that, “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams” (Spiegelman 16), showing readers that he is in way over his head. That is, at the beginning, perhaps Art thought that creating a visual account of the Holocaust was going to be easy, but apparently it is not because the topic itself is extremely complex. Moreover, Art admits that, “There’s so much I’ll never be able to