A Rhetorical Analysis Of Maus

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MAUS is a famous comic depicting an interview between Art Spiegelman and his father about the Holocaust and his father’s personal life. In this comic, Art is struggling to tell his father’s story. Spiegelman chooses to describe his father’s story to convey a truth that other impersonal texts cannot. However, he realizes that his father is not perfect; in fact, he is deeply flawed. Art wonders if his audience will be able to empathize with his dad, and whether or not his story will be a departure from Nazi rhetoric. He struggles with his journalistic impulse to tell his story to the world, and the concern that telling the full truth could be damaging.
While telling his story reveals the impact of the Holocaust, it also reveals the complication …show more content…
Instead, Art chooses to tell the full story. He says to his father, “It’s great material. It makes everything more real – more human. I want to tell your story, the way it really happened,” (Spiegelman 23). He worries that depicting his father’s flaws affirms Jewish stereotypes, but he feels a strong impulse to tell the entire story. Art idolizes the truth, but realizes that it does not always conform to what is ideal. This complicates how the reader can interpret Art’s approach. Telling the personal stories can be enlightening, but is that necessarily a good thing? In the end, Art included the stories about Vladek’s obsession with money. It can be assumed that he believes the value of the truth outweighed the negatives. The value Art places on telling these stories is shown in a confrontation with his father. When his father confesses that he burned all of his wife’s diaries, Art screams, “God damn you! You – you murderer! How the hell could you do such a thing!!” (Spiegelman 159). He accuses his father of being a murderer, but murderer of what? It could be that the story of his wife was a piece of her. By destroying her story, he murdered something
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