MAUS: A SURVIVOR’S TALE 399
in Spiegelman and wife Françoise Mouly’s underground magazine RAW. Th e shifts in
perspective and style that occur between the initial strip and the fi nal volumes refl ect
the present-day confl icts between father and son. Th is relationship becomes as central
to the work as its considerations of wartime social and political conditions.
Maus is narrated in three layers: the story of Vladek’s and his wife Anja’s travails
during the Holocaust, Vladek’s eff orts to explain various incidents to Artie, and Artie’s
attempts to represent his father’s story accurately while grappling with their often
discordant relationship. Th is complex structure helps to illuminate the book’s subtitle,
A Survivor’s Tale , which likely refers to the impact of the Holocaust on both Vladek’s
and Artie’s lives. Such ambiguity of meaning is also present in the two volumes’ indi-
vidual titles, My Father Bleeds History and And Here My Troubles Began , which suggest
not only the torment that Vladek must undergo as he recounts the war for his son
but also Artie’s fi ght to come to terms with his own guilt. He remains painfully aware
that he did not experience the Holocaust, much less die as his parents’ fi rst child did, yet
he seeks to capture it for his own creative work.
Many of the representational choices that Spiegelman made in Maus refl ect the
violence and deprivations of war. Th e story’s panels are often densely packed with
details, as in a panel near the beginning of Maus I , where Vladek gets onto his exer-
cise bike to begin narrating the story. His bike represents a way for him to maintain
cardiac health, yet the repeated images of his furious pedaling on a stationary machine
suggest that he is not progressing into the future. His concentration-camp number
is clearly visible on his left forearm, while Artie sits surrounded by books and col-
lege pennants from his own past. Spiegelman notes that he learned this economy of
design from his father’s insistence upon using every inch of available space, a hard-
earned lesson from the war. He also illustrates the ways in which history persists into
the present day by juxtaposing images of past and present within the same panel, as
when Vladek tells Artie about four Jews hanged for dealing goods on the black mar-
ket. Th eir dangling feet and anguished faces persist through three additional panels,
and their memory brings tears to the contemporary storyline as well. Spiegelman also
uses some more conventional comic-book tropes to highlight these themes, including
textual sound eff ects, panels shaped like a Star of David or crossed by enormous swas-
tikas to underline the hunted Jews’ sense of vulnerability, and panels whose contents
spill into the gutters, suggesting the impossibility of containing such diffi cult truths.
One of Maus ’s most important subjects is the father-son relationship. Spiegelman’s
exploration of generational diff erences allows him to tell Vladek’s story while rejecting
many of the narrative conventions central to other accounts of the Holocaust. Read-
ers learn at the beginning of the fi rst volume that Artie has come to visit in order to
record Vladek’s story for a book he is writing. Th is apparent reconciliation is hardly a
smooth one, however, as Vladek repeatedly tells Artie not to include information that
is, however, present in the book. Artie does not allow his father the space to process
the events he has witnessed, but chooses instead to judge his actions. Volume I closes,
for instance, with Artie calling Vladek a murderer for choosing to burn Anja’s diaries.
