Responsibility In Maus

The consequences of catastrophes are everlasting. Maus is an intricate graphic novel written by Artie Spiegelman that entails the horrifying experiences of the Holocaust through the eyes of his father Vladek. Art’s upbringing in a household of survivors and the calamity that his father lived through were detrimental to both characters’ mental health. A clear theme in Maus is the effect responsibility has on those who obtain it. There are several occasions in the story where someone is displayed as being accountable for very pressing situations; Maus demonstrates that culpability is often the result of having an obligation. Vladek and Artie develop guilt from taking on responsibility because Vladek perceives himself as to blame for surviving

Spiegelman incorporates his short comic Prisoner on the Hell Planet in Maus I to exhibit the most important time he experienced this emotion: when his mother killed herself. The last time Artie ever saw his mother she asked him, “...you still love me...don’t you?” Artie replied by hardly acknowledging her presence, with an abrupt “sure Ma!” As seen from the earliest chapters in Maus, Anja suffered severely from mental disorders; Artie was destined to develop characteristics of his mother’s sicknesses through genetics. The comic reveals that he was newly recovering from a mental institution, but was sucked back into the black hole of his crazed mind. It is evident Artie began to relapse into his insanity upon hearing the news of his mother’s suicide in the second panel on the last page of the comic, where several scenes are drawn into one. The scenes drawn into this section are the possible reasons Artie is thinking could have caused his mother’s death, since she left him clueless by ending her life without a note. The first one pictures Anja laying in a bathtub of her own blood, labeled, “menopausal depression,” and the second one portrays Jewish corpses piled up under a swastika, labeled, “Hitler did it!” These two express that he thought the blame could be placed on his mother’s mental illness or perhaps the cruelty she faced during the Holocaust, yet the last alternative for her death was the one that impacted

As a matter of fact, they may even argue that the only reason Artie and Vladek ever felt guilty was that they got a chance to live their lives to the fullest and did not take advantage of this, taking for granted what those close to Vladek and Artie had robbed from them. To support their claim, dissenters may also say that Artie and Vladek could not have possibly felt responsible for all of their troubles because the Holocaust was the root of all these problems; Vladek and Artie were just a part of it, but not the reason it began. Ultimately, feeling responsible for a series of consequences is the reason why Vladek and Artie feel culpability throughout Maus because they show that they perceive themselves as always at fault; it was within their hands to alter the outcomes of certain situations, or so they thought. They show readers that there was always something they felt they could have done but never did, and for this, both protagonists carried the weight of guilt