Maus II

As im browsing the web trying to dodge those sites that try to sell you essays. I found this website that has different scenes from the Graphic Novel "Maus II" that are being analyzed by differnet points of view. The article that im going to talk about the author od this web page is Antonio S. Oliver.  Oliver explains why the approach Spiegelman took in writing this novel works. Oliver first talks about Spiegelman’s decision to write the novel in comic book form. His quick reasoning for advocating Spiegelman’s approach was by saying the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I think Oliver has a great point here. Especially when talking about the Holocaust, a topic and event that people say words cannot describe, why not draw a picture that could tell a lot about the Holocaust in a less amount of space. I think this also works because using just words to describe a tragic event like the Holocaust would clearly not do justice to even start to describe it, and not saying that pictures do do it justice, but the combination of pictures and words comes closer to portray this event than words can. Below where Oliver talks about writing this novel in comic book form, he talks about Spiegelman’s decision to put all the people in the novel as different animals. One of Oliver’s first points is that showing the people in the Holocaust as cats and mice and even pigs forces the reader to throw out all preconceived notions that they have of human nature. Oliver also contributes his insight that the Jews were portrayed as mice because the Nazi once called Jews, “vermin of society,” so Oliver thinks that might be Spiegelman’s reasoning for having Jews as mice. Oliver then says that the Nazis in the novel had to be cats because everyone knows that cats and mice are “natural sworn enemies.”link