Stereotypes In Art Spiegelman's Maus

In Maus by Art Spiegelman, Spiegelman conveys his father’s story of surviving the Holocaust through a graphic novel. The graphic novel recounts the truth of the war and how one family and the people who helped them along the way survived the war even if they didn’t live to see the end. The author’s narrative choices in this novel help realistically tell this story and the use of a non realistic medium to represent a nonfiction story helps convey the accuracy of the novel itself. While refusing a purely realistic medium to represent his father’s story, Spiegelman effectively utilizes his use of portraying humans as animals to convey the truth of his father’s story. The unrealistic portrayal of the characters in the retelling of Vladek’s story helps the reader grasp the true reality of the events his father recounts. Spiegelman's use of mice to portray the Jewish people of the Holocaust and of today allows the reader to read the realistic truth of the representation of his father’s experiences at war. By using mice to represent the people targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust,

This is because the stories are so unbelievably gory and unbelievable that have the characters be drawn as animals almost makes the reader think that the events are simply the events of a cartoon mouse’s life and not a retelling of a Holocaust story. The accuracy in the events described is effectively shown because even though the reader is tricked into reading about a cartoon mouse’s life, the author reminds the reader at the end that the cartoon mouse is actually a human being by including Vladek’s real picture in the end when Vladek is showing Spiegelman the box of pictures from the war (294). The graphic novel medium used by Spiegelman almost hinders but at the same time helps the reader’s understanding of the reality of Vladek’s