Masking the Unmasked

Never did I ever expect a comic to get extremely deep. Comics are something definitely enjoyed by many, but for the "comical-ness" of it, not the intense-dark-extreme-serious-symbolic-and-so-forth-ness of it. I am of course refering to Art Spiegeman's Maus.


I was reading the second volume casually, snacking on some food, when I turned to the first page of the second chapter and stopped to stare. On this page sits Spiegelman himself as he narrates specific dates and the death of his father. More importantly though, as he does this, he is sitting at his desk on top of countless bodies of dead mice surrounded by flies. The chapter itself is called "Time Flies" and as the flies surround him, dates are given all over the place. The sporadicness of the flies show how jumbled time and events are to Speigelman. When looking at the page more carefully, Spiegelman is wearing a mouse mask over a human face, rather than portraying himself as an actual mouse like the dead bodies. After taking in the shocking image and noticing this detail, I found it extremely thought provoking. Why in fact would Spiegelman separate himself from the dead bodies?

Throughout the first volume masks were most commonly used by the mice to hide their own identity. The mask was meant to resemble hiding who they were for protection, key phrase "who they were." So why would Spiegelman put a mouse mask on himself? After thinking about it for a while, it was this that I thought of: Spiegelman puts the mask on himself, and not on the other mice because he himself is unsure of who the mice, or Jews rather, were and how they lived during the Nazis' reign. Spiegelman throughout the book works hard to understand his father's situation and experiences, but in the end, he can never really know. His own mask represents this attempt to place himself in the Jews shoes.

The real Jews are the real mice, they knew their life, the way they lived, all the pains caused by the Nazis. Spiegelman on the other hand, can only dream of what really happned then, just like the rest of most of the world- Or so I thought. It was then a couple pages later that I realized that someone, a Czech Jew and a survivor of Auschwitz, was also wearing a mask. Why would he also be wearing a mask, if he were to really know the pain and sorrows? Maybe it still has to do with understanding. Although the survivor did in fact experience it, Spiegelman did not, therefore he still cannot realize the true truths behind all that happened, still keeping a true survivor masked away from Spiegelman and his own realizations.

Maybe this is true, but all I honestly know right now is that my head is spinning. This is not what I expected when considering comicbooks. Comical? Haha, very very funny. (That was sarcasm by the way).