The Masks We Wear

 We all like to fool ourselves into being someone we are not. Every day, we take on many different roles – a stressed student, an all-star athlete, and a perfect child. Yet, we never realize that we end up trapping ourselves into this perfect reality that we’ve created. Perhaps Art Spiegelman felt the same way when he realized where Maus had led him. In part 1 of Maus, Artie is simply interested in learning more about his father’s past and what he went through, but part 2 is starkly different. In this part, Artie begins to realize that Vladek’s story, along with the stories of the millions of Jews that went through the Holocaust, was not his story to tell. On page 41, Artie is depicted sitting at a drawing desk placed upon a pile of dead Jews. This image shows how the drawing easel, the same one that he created the first book on and is the stem of his success, now rested on the deaths of those Jews. It also demonstrates how Artie’s depictions of Vladek’s story were inevitably burying the stories of other survivors and those who didn’t make it through. However, the most important thing to take note of on this page is that Artie appears as a man who wears the mask of a mouse. He also emphasizes throughout the book at how he was never there, and he didn’t understand what the Jews went through to be able to draw them. In this manner, Artie is demonstrating that he is simply pretending to be a Jewish man, but his true identity is different from what is seen on the outside. This is quite similar to how Vladek, Anja, and others are seen wearing masks throughout the two books to keep their identities hidden from the Germans. Despite this similarity, Artie and Vladek’s situations differ immensely – Vladek hides his identity to protect himself from the Germans while Artie hides his identity due to his confusion since he cannot even begin to relate to what so many of them had been through. As depicted on page 42 and 43, Artie gets younger as reporters swarm him with questions. With this, Artie is able to show how he feels like a child when he is spoken to about his book. He attempts to convey how he doesn’t understand the true extent of the events that occurred since he is simply transcribing his father’s story. The minute he becomes his younger self, the reporters disappear, and he lets out a sigh of relief. As he heads to therapy and learns more about what and why he is looking into the past, he gradually becomes an adult again, demonstrating how he is beginning to change his thinking into something more mature while also realizing that despite not having been through the same experience, he could still write the story. However, on page 47, as soon as he begins playing the recording of his father’s story, he again shrinks into a small child who is still unable to understand the true extent of what really happened. Ultimately, Art Spiegelman attempts to demonstrate that identity can be much more complex than simply belonging to a certain race or group of people and that these characteristics develop over time due to factors that surround us (some of which we may have no control over).

(Spiegelman, 41)

(Spiegelman, 42)

                                        (Spigelman, 46)

 (Spigelman, 47)

Signing off for now, 

Reality Sucks