Maus + White

In Maus, by Art Spiegelman, we are given a recollection of his father's experiences in the times of the Holocaust. Spiegelman writes this comic in a style where he is discussing with his father about the father's past experiences; he maintains a constant interaction between the past and the present so you get a full understanding of Spiegelman and his father's relationship, but also know the father's history and what he had to go through to shape him into who he is today. We learn from White's article about narration that writing a story based on history is fairly easy, but is this really how it is for Spiegelman's story?

White claims that history stories tend to speak for themselves and tends to come to us with ease. The reason for this is because with history it is chronological and we accept most claims to past events as truth because there tends to be documentated proof. The case with Spiegelman's father is told in the time of the Holocaust and of course we all know that happened, so we are easily accepting of his father's past history. History is easy to tell a story about because it is all based on events that have already happened. Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus helps tell his father's story with visual aid. White talks about how author's tend to shape a story to have an end and to have a meaning because history on its own really has no meaning tell we give it one. This artwork could possibly be Spiegelman's way of shaping the story as White claims.

The artwork of the mice, jewish people, and the cats, nazi germans, helps show how Spiegelman tried to shape the story of Maus and give us a certain perspective. The message that was displayed simply that the mice and cats are enemies. The mice are hunted by the cats and tend to be killed by them, so in this sense Spiegleman is using this artwork to express how the jewish people must have felt during the time of the Holocaust. There is also the question though of if his father perhaps put a certain mending to his story when he was telling it to his son.

I would have to believe that he did since he could only really tell the story from his own perspective and thus certain things that he claims to have experienced may not have been exactly how he claims. I believe this is why Spiegelman wished to have his mother's journals so that he could use both of their perspectives into shaping a story much closer to what actually happened to his father and mother, but also because he has no idea what his mother experienced upon reaching the concentration camps. Although Spiegelman may have mended the story to have a certain meaning, I have to assume that his father had done the same when telling the story to him.