A Survivor's Scream Heard Through a Mouse's Squeak

While Anja and Vladek are hiding in Mrs. Motonowa’s cellar, they find rats living among them.  Anja is hysterical, so to make her “feel more easy”, Vladek lies and tells her that “they’re just mice”, even though “of course, it was really rats”.   This is symbolic of Art Spiegelman’s choice to use mice rather than people in his comic. Harm inflicted on mice is much easier to witness than harm inflicted on human beings, so by drawing mice instead of people, Spiegelman is lessening the weight of the Holocaust for the reader, making it easier for them to swallow, just as Vladek is easing Anja’s nerves. 

Isn't this more depressing to look at than just mice?  You can see the sadness in their sullen faces and the weakness in their ever-so human bodies.

Also, I found it interesting that Spiegelman digresses from his metaphor and acknowledges the existence of mice in their animalistic form by including a drawing of a mouse on all fours.  We are used to seeing his anthropomorphic mice dressed nicely in top hats and trench coats, talking and smoking and typing up graphic novels.  However, on this page, Spiegelman has drawn an enormously scary mouse.  It has bushy, black fur, a dark, menacing face, and a scaly tail.  The mouse looks dirty and savageous, and it marks a stark contrast to the following frame, in which Art and his father are depicted as clean, white mice, holding a conversation. 

 

 

 This break in the mouse-as-people metaphor is a representation of the uncontainable horrors faced by Jews during the Holocaust.  At this point, Spiegelman has broken form because of the overflowing grief and guilt that has manifested within him from hearing his father’s story.  In Volume II, Art even has to start seeing a therapist because the overwhelmingly large weight of the Holocaust makes it hard for him to take pleasure in his own life.  Even after his first MAUS book achieved great success, Art feels like no matter what he does, “it doesn’t seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz”(44).

  To demonstrate Art’s internal struggle to hold down the facts, the mouse is not boxed or captioned, and it is kind of leaking from the comic, in order to represent Art’s sorrow leaking into his writing.  Also, there is no page number on this page because the grief felt by Art, his father, Anja, and all other Jews was real, just as the mouse drawn is real mouse, and the real events depicted in the comic happened to real people.  Therefore, they are not merely part of a plot in a storybook. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”  And although the anthropomorphism has been effective in demonstrating the vulnerability of the Jews in the claws of the Nazi-cats throughout the comic, in this scene, an image of the dirty mouse and Anja’s “AIEE!” gives the reader a clearer sense of how terrible the Holocaust was for Vladek in that Polish woman’s freezing cold rat-infested cellar, and makes the events more real, because it reminds the reader that mice are truly just animals, and the Holocaust was truly happening to humans. 

On a final note, I think that this comic itself represents the Holocaust through a “scream” rather than a “thesis” because of its unorthodox nature.