Thaneshwar's Blog

  Maus II is filled with new motifs and rhetorical devices, than the ones found in Maus I. For example in Chapter 2, Auschwitz (Time Flies), in the future, everyone is being depicted as a human with masks on to represent the animal that they once were. This shows that, when Art was making money or getting attention for his father’s story, his identity as a Jew goes away, as he didn’t even experience The Holocaust and he’s making money off of it. This is also accompanied by him sitting on a desk above a bunch of dead Jews, showing that all these people died and Art is just here profiting off all of them. And Art himself feels bad for doing this, which is why these symbols appear around him. When all the reporters and assistants come to him, to tell him what to do next to profit better and ask him dumb questions about the books, Artie gets smaller and smaller in his chair because he is getting overwhelmed and doesn’t like that he’s profiting off of this either. Another instance where...

In the notebook, there's a rough plan about the layout of a "bunker" to stay hidden from the soldiers. It distracted the soldiers with coal everywhere so they wouldn't suspect what was underneath. On the next page Spiegelman uses parallelism, but with images, and shows the side view of the bunker in action when the soldiers are present. The second image shows the Jews hiding in the designated bunker area and soldiers looking everywhere. One key detail is the dogs know exactly where they are hiding because of their sense of smell, and you can tell by the way they are looking into the coal bin and staring into the fake wall in the basement. This goes in line with when the description says "and they  knew  that Jews were laying here". It shows that they assumed that every house had Jews hiding in them, and their suspicion was proven to be true if they found any. And there's also dramatic irony in this panel, as the audience knows the soldiers are looking ar...