Early on in Maus, before the Holocaust story begins, Vladek describes his past before the war. Vladek recalls that “I was at that time, young. And really a nice, handsome boy.” Vladek also describes the effect this has on the opposite sex: “I had a lot of girls what I didn’t even know would run after me…people always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino” (13). In a similar instance, when Lucia falls to the ground as Vladek leaves he describes himself as having “strong legs” (20).
One issue I have with these passages is that in some ways, they remind me of unreliable narrators I’ve encountered in fiction. While Vladek is certainly not as delusional about his past and present as, say, Brett Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, or as willfully dishonest as Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, I still feel a familiar hint that someone isn’t being quite honest–or at the very least is playing up their past a bit. This led me to think about reliable narrators, their role and the importance of honesty in a story like Maus.
One issue that comes to play is the role of two narrators. Maus is a strange combination of memoir and non-fiction told through the comic medium. The memoir is all Art’s, a story about father and son. The non-fiction is the mediated story of Vladek’s survival, told to (and recounted/structured/painted) by Art. One of the only novels I can immediately think of that uses multiple levels of narration to tell a story is House of Leaves and without getting too much into that work, let’s just say it’s a mess when it comes to questions about narrator reliability: none of the novel’s three narrative threads are ever presented as completely factual or without their own holes.
Of course, in a story that recounts the horrors of Holocaust Poland, we must rely on our narrators to tell us the truth. A story with such serious subject matter must be told with a high degree of honesty lest it undermine the importance of its message about past atrocities and man’s ability to dehumanize, target and exterminate other men. Our emotional response relies upon this honesty.
It’s also important to note that while I questioned Vladek’s reliability in those early stages, I never felt those notions return as I read on. I wonder if a result of having a mediated story is that reliability always becomes slightly muddled. Or are we just seeing what Art describes on page 131 when he says “…it’s something that worries me about the book I’m doing about him…In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” Perhaps, when it comes to his pre-war past, Vladek really isn’t the most reliable narrator. Does that unreliability vanish when he talks about surviving the war because the events are too traumatic to embellish? It’s pretty clear to me that Art is just trying to create an honest representation of his father, even if the end result will only reinforce some stereotypes. All of this helps reinforce Art’s reliability as a narrator. Still, I sometimes wonder about Vladek’s reliability in those early sections, which has me paying close attention to notions of reliability throughout the text.
So now, I leave it to you: Did anyone else question reliability at any point during the reading? Is it even possible for a memoir/non-fiction text to play with notions of unreliability, or does that immediately place a work in the realm of fiction? Have you seen other examples where mediated re-tellings have hints of unreliability? Or am I seeing something that isn’t there and just being jealous that Vladek was such a ladies’ man in his younger days?