When I first started reading this Graphic Novel I didn’t know what to expect. As I went along I actually started to get into the story and the characters pretty easily. I like the fact that the father’s writing and speech is related to how someone like him would speak. Another thing I was entertained by was the different animals. Mouses were Jewish, Cats were the Nazi’s, Pigs were non Jewish, and the Dogs were American. I really loved the fact that us Americans were the Dogs! It could be an insult but I saw it as we are above the Nazi’s and that they were our enemy as well. This novel does have a very sad and dark story to it, but it cuts off scenes that might seem too gruesome for the readers. Like the scene where the Nazi slammed a little kids head into the wall. The random extra comment strip in the middle of volume one of Maus confused me a bit. I wasn’t sure why that was there and if it was needed. It had a little bit of a different styling and it had humans in it. Overall the Novel was quite enjoyable and had a very interesting way of doing it.
2 thoughts on “MAUS Cat vs Mouse!”
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It’s interesting that you say that Americans being dogs puts us “above the Nazis.” That kind of hierarchy, which echoes the Nazis’ view of the world, is exactly what Spiegelman wants to make fun of—and undo—in Maus. As the work goes on, he plays more and more with these animal metaphors, and by the end, you couldn’t really say one is “above” or “below” the other.
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Americans portrayed as dogs positions Americans against the Nazi cats, and kind of sides them with the mice, in the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” sort of way. It’s an interesting way to think about it, at least in my opinion, and I wonder if Spiegelman did this intentionally. Like you said, I did think of the depiction of dogs to be insulting at first, as if it suggested a sort of bruteness and/or stupidity, maybe? But now I wonder if perhaps it is suggesting the kind of leadership (think Homeword Bound/we3) and intelligence that dogs sometimes exhibit. It all depends on how you want to look at it, or what you want to see–how you apply your own personal prejudice. This definitely fits in to Professor Sample’s point about how one animal never comes off as “above” or “below” the others–for example, there are obvious negative qualities about cats that we could associate with Nazis, if we chose to.