“Mouse: The Survivor’s Tale” is an outstanding example of a combination of incongruous form and content. It is a great skill to put such a terrible story into the format of a comic book. Art Spiegelman’s work is dedicated to the horrors of the Holocaust and allows talking about the war from different points of view. The work is large-scale and much-unbiased and observes the causes of those events. The author managed to convey the story, without embellishing or smoothing out the details. Thus, The Survivor’s Tale is a serious work in a genre that is considered frivolous and childish.
In 1978, the American comic artist Art Spiegelman began to work on a book, the materials for which were the stories of Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust (Gavrilă 62). The story is presented in the form of an interview. This element of the narrative made the characters alive and real. Each character is presented with their individual and unique character. The writing, however, was complicated by the fact that Art and Vladek did not have a great relationship as the old man had a difficult character. However, Spiegelman continued to talk with the man and write the work. The result would be the creation of a comic book that reflected not only the history of the Holocaust but also the author’s own life.
In the work, there are ugly at first glance black-and-white illustrations, simple and at the same time extremely depressing plot, and a unique way of presentation. The comic is specially designed in a simple graphic style. The characters are deliberately drawn similar to each other, without striking facial features, differing only in the style of clothing (Gavrilă 67). Thus, through the representation of nationalities by animal species, the author wanted to reduce the division of people by ethnicity. Spiegelman wanted to demonstrate the absurdity of the perception of people according to various patterns and clichés like national or political views.
“Mouse: The Survivor’s Tale” is the only graphic novel that won the Pulitzer Prize, this work is studied in many schools and universities. This is a real story, reworked into an art form. Spiegelman became a very personal book and a kind of tribute to all the victims of the Holocaust. The Spiegelman family’s story accurately describes everything that happened at that time and all the atrocities and horrors that people went through.
Work Cited
Gavrilă, Ana-Maria. “Holocaust Representation and Graphical Strangeness in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: “Funny Animals,” Constellations, and Traumatic Memory.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Communicatio, vol. 4, 2017, pp. 61-75.