Like many of the other responses to Maus II I too enjoyed the greater interaction between the past and present in this volume. We see more of the details we needed in Volume I of how the past has shaped the present of who Vladek is and why his relationships are the way they are, but I think more importantly this volume attempts to create a connection between the past and present that is larger than Speigelman’s story. The simple fact that Spiegelman feels a need to write the story of his father’s survival shows how he sees how this story needs to be told to the contemporary audience, but in this volume we see Art’s struggle to understand that reasoning which I appreciated and made me better appreciate the story. We see Art’s struggle on page 68 when Art needs to put Vladek’s time in Auschwitz into an understandable timeline, closed and contained. Vladek responds to Art’s questioning of time saying, “So? Take less time to the black work. In Auschwitz we didn’t wear watches” (Spiegelman 68). We see the timeline of the right side of the page stretching almost half the page. Spiegelman begins the timeline with Vladek’s entering into Auschwitz in 1944, which seems to negate Vladek’s the struggling and survival prior to Auschwitz presented in Volume I. However, the timeline Franciose’s exclamation from the present cuts off the timeline, leaving the timeline unfinished and seeming continued into the future. In Chute’s essay she presents page 68 as a layering of the past and present, but I see it as more a continuation of the past into the present, a history that cannot be contained by a beginning or an end. I think this need to contain the history of the Holocaust shows a need to keep the past in the past, but we see throughout the novel how that is not a reality.
We see this struggle with the past and its confinement/simultaneous presence through Art’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy in this volume’s beginning. Art’s therapist pushes Art to question the need for his book and tells him, “People haven’t changed…Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust” (Spiegelman 45). The therapist states that there is no end to the timeline, people have been the same since before the Holocaust until now – genocide and prejudice still exist. We see this presence through Vladek’s own racism towards the hitchhiker. But I think more importantly the therapist questioning of the need for another Holocaust story to push Art shows how history needs to be conformed for the present. It isn’t that history is confined to a timeline, but that how that time in history is presented gives it an end. By breaking the mold of creating a nonfiction, biographical comic about the Holocaust he puts an end to the timeline – the past enters into a present medium of history and thus crosses that gap that we see him struggle with in order to understand and present the story.