Testimony In Art Spiegelman

Before I began this course, I found a Literature class that would suffice my core requirement while not requiring me to wake up at a ridiculous hour of the morning. The concept of Literature as Testimony never crossed my mind, until Professor Harrison-Kahan passed out the syllabus for the class and right under “ENGL 1080 20: Literature Core” lied the subtitle, “Literature as Testimony.” Throughout the semester we read and analyzed a variety of works of both fiction and nonfiction that mostly take place throughout modern America (1800s – Present); however, I only truly uncovered the concept of “Literature as Testimony” when I opened the graphic novel Maus. By using graphic novels as the medium for telling his father’s story, Art Spiegelman

Without even opening the novel, the reader views an illustration of two mouse-like creatures and an overarching animal with whiskers that seemingly resembles Adolf Hitler. Rather than following the standard Holocaust novel, Spiegelman utilizes animals to represent the different nationalities in the story. He uses mice to represent the Jewish people and cats to replace the German Nazis. The play on animal imagery adds importance because of Spiegelman’s choice of using the predator/prey combo of cat and mouse. This added importance greatly manifests itself in Chapter 6 “Mouse Trap” of Volume I. The chapter focuses on the hide and seek nature society associates with cats and mice. Throughout the chapter, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman are forced to hide in a variety of cellars, barns and behind walls in order to survive the ever-persistent Germans. In addition to utilizing animals to describe the nationalities, Spiegelman also emphasizes, at times, the humanistic qualities of the characters. Specifically, Figure 1, Spiegelman draws himself laying across the ground almost as a child does while coloring a book, but instead of doing simplistic coloring, he is writing down his father’s story of killing a German soldier. In addition, his father, Vladek, sits in the chair dressed like a businessman with a suit and tie and the glasses laying on his snout. Spiegelman makes his drawings offer humanistic features as well to remind the audience of the realness of his graphic novel. Sometimes reading a comix leaves the reader simply reading the words and skimming the pictures or vice versa. By drawing the characters with more human-like features at times, Spiegelman attracts the reader back to the importance of this Holocaust novel and the characters stand in for us as a reader more when we can relate to them. At key moments, like