(Auto)Biographies at Risk: Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Abstract

This paper studies the way an autobiographical graphic novel is realized within the context of historical events. As a sub-form of comics, the birth of the graphic novel marks a specific form of storytelling. Maus’s use of visual images to serve narration in a book-length form is a unique approach to a seismic historical event such as the Holocaust. Complicated narrative structure and multiple temporal layers make Maus a (auto) biography deviant from the common pattern of autobiographies. The relationship of father and son plays a decisive role in leading the narratives. The father tells a story in a told-to story setting, while the son tries to keep his father from digressing from war narrative. As a Holocaust survivor’s son, the author traces back to his origin, trying to visualize and create his father’s war experiences. The book intends to make a biographical sketch of the father and to record the son’s own understanding of his father’s story. The father tries to influence his son with his testimony, but their turbulent relationship intrudes into the story and undermines the father’s authenticity. Maus turns to the medium which calls for “viewing” as well as “reading” the story. The troubled relationship of the father and the son is dramatized visually and verbally. We can see how this story is told to the son and how this book is created by the artist-son. Readers also can see how the artist is burdened with his father’s legacy through the use of graphic image. As the father has been bound in Auschwitz, there could be no other place for his son to go for his origin. Maus ends with the father’s death. This marks a formal ending of the father’s biography and also of an autobiographical search of the son inseparable from the Holocaust.