In Maus, Art Spiegelman produces what can be considered a reaction to the Holocaust and its complicated consequences. It is a graphic representation of the various horrors of the Holocaust and he chooses to make his characters anthropomorphic. It could be argued that in an individual story as impactful as Vladek's, using the same caricature-like animal heads to denote various races serves to trivialize the story. However, Spiegelman's use of anthropomorphic characters serves a number of important purposes which, it could be argued, justify his technique and counterbalance the negative views that may be expressed against it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay It should be kept in mind that Spiegelman does not simply deal with the Holocaust in an academic, somewhat detached and objective manner. He is confronted with the very personal reality of his father and mother's story of surviving the Holocaust and simultaneously with his own, often ambivalent, feelings towards them. Everything in his life, one could argue, was in one way or another essentially touched by the Holocaust because his parents both lived through it. Thus, Spiegelman is necessarily very attached to the subject addressed. In “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” we see that these strong feelings are portrayed in a very impactful and disturbing way. This is something that Spiegelman worked on earlier to express his feelings about his mother's death, and one gets the feeling that this technique was not particularly successful as far as Spiegelman was concerned. By using animal faces, he removes the starkness of the horror and gives himself and readers space to explore the story without being too emotionally disturbed. For people who did not survive the Holocaust, it is difficult to imagine the kind of horrors that were inflicted on people in concentration camps. Spiegelman therefore made the narration possible by creating detachment and humor about a very dark and tragic incident. There are also several other important reasons why Spiegelman's technique is justified. By giving mouse heads to Jews, he makes a sarcastic statement about the Nazis' treatment of Jews as vermin. It also refers to the resilience of mice as a whole, which can be seen as a veiled compliment to the community for surviving the Holocaust. It can be argued that instead of imposing racial stereotypes, Spiegelman actually satirizes them and ultimately inspires readers to question them. By deliberately exalting racial stereotypes, for example by describing the French as frogs, he actually highlights the futility and hollowness of these stereotypes. By making his protagonists all look the same, Spiegelman makes the audience understand that although this particular character's survivor's story is Vladek's, there are many other similar stories of victims and survivors of the Holocaust that have never been told. So while highlighting the individual plight of Vladek and Anja, it also pays homage to the millions of people whose stories it cannot tell individually. So, although it is a personal memoir, at the same time it moves away from its subject and manages to encompass the enormity of the Holocaust. Often in Maus the idea of ​​racial identity becomes confused. Indeed, if at one level race and ethnicity seem so deeply rooted that one cannot escape without escaping=1082112)