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This essay is a response to the question: ‘For the character Art, creating this text is his way of understanding his father’s experience.’
Discuss.
Description
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Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus utilises the graphic novel convention in exploring the complex responsibility incumbent upon artists endeavouring to preserve, illuminate and understand the past. Employing an anthropomorphic metaphor which ascribes to each nationality an animal – rendering Jews mice and Germans the cruelly taunting cats – Spiegelman creates a deliberate discussion of the nature of humanity. The metafiction element to the text reveals Spiegelman’s struggle as he grapples to comprehend the actions of indeed very complex human beings, of whose The graphic novel exposes much of the turmoil of Art’s relationship with his father, whom he “hadn’t seen … in a long time” prior to his decision to write “that book about [Vladek]… the one I used to talk to [him] about.”
