Maus II chapter 2 breakdown

 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 he gets smaller is when he’s getting therapy from his doctor. “No matter what I accomplish, it doesn’t seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz” (Spiegelman). And this was his problem all along. He listened to his dad’s story and wrote about it, and he tried to experience the same things, but it doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t an actual person in a concentration camp. And this has been a recurring theme throughout Maus I and II, and Art finally realizes himself and is getting problems because of it.

Comments

  1. AnonymousDecember 10, 2023 at 7:38 PM

    I like how you talked about the masks. I wrote something similar about chapter 2, but I forgot to mention the masks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousDecember 11, 2023 at 5:32 AM

    I liked your analysis on Maus. This reflection really summarizes what we learnt in class and also some new motifs

    ReplyDelete

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