• Explore
• Learn
• Try It
• Task

Explore

In a unit that focuses on understanding people from all ethnicities and from all walks of life, it is truly amazing that our next author, Art Spiegelman, one of our foremost American cartoonists, decided to use the metaphors of mice, cats, and pigs to symbolize ethnicities in his graphic novel, Maus I, A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History.

Spiegelman introduces his readers to meta-fiction, the combinations of art and historical fiction, in his sobering tale about his family, Polish Jews, during WWII Poland. As the reader turns the pages of the novel, he discovers this meta-fiction includes a comic book, a graphic novel, a memoir, an autobiography, oral history, allegoryAn allegory is a symbolic representation of characters and events as an abstract idea, and nonfiction. Swinging from the past to the present and back again, just as a pendulum, Spiegelman cuts 1978 New York into his novel about Hilter’s Europe and the Holocaust. Taking on the horrible account of Jews, suffering fear, separation, disease, starvation, and death at extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dakar, perhaps, Spiegelman somehow spares his readers the severity of crimes against Jews who faced the showers, the gas chambers, killing as many as 6,000 per day. Like Elie Wiesel, Vladek Spiegelman is a Holocaust survivor.

You may want to listen to this interview with Art Spiegelman (08:44).