Prisoner On The Hell Planet Analysis

Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus is a story that clearly displays the appalling treatment of the Jew's during this time. To effectively show this, Speigelman uses a variety of powerful literary devices. These include the use of black, white and shading, the way people are depicted and font & text size.

A good example of this is the inserted comic, Prisoner On the Hell Planet (pg. 102-105). The inclusion of this story is to clearly represent Speigelman's emotions when he finds out about his mother's suicide and the time immediately following it. The author's intention with the piece is quite distinct, the reader is meant to feel Art's grief, confusion, anger and guilt. Speigelman showcases the emotion in the insert by using the following

Throughout Prisoner On the Hell Planet, the colour black is largely intensified, in contrast to the rest of the novel which has a white background. The purpose of this is to highlight the dark themes of the situation. The intensity of the shading effectively portrays the grief and overwhelming sense of morbidity in the story. Even before reading the text, the reader instantly gets a foreboding feeling, based on the negative emotions associated with

Throughout the rest of the novel people are represented as animals, each different species looking more or less the same. However in Prisoner On the Hell Planet, Speigelman draws people in human form, each person full of emotion and character. The panel where we see Anja clearly illustrates her depression. Another example is how the doctor is depicted. He was drawn as someone of great evil due to his role in Art’s life: telling him his mother was dead. Another noticeable point is that Art is drawn wearing the uniform of the concentration camp. This illustrates that the author feels as though he is a prisoner of his own life, and ties back to the finishing scene where Art is behind bars, angry at his mother for committing a ‘crime’ and leaving him to take the