Belief is a powerful thing; we often fail to realize how important it is to focus on the positive in ourselves to overcome adverse external factors.  The first panel of page 28, Volume II of Maus is a wide view, focusing a lot on the surroundings of the mice, including the chimney out the window that inspires such terror.  Overwhelmed by his seemingly dire situation, Vladek begins to cry in the second panel; all he metaphorically sees (and all we literally see through the window above him) is darkness.  In the third, a priest arrives, notably blocking out the window through which the terrifying chimneys might otherwise have been seen; his concern temporarily distracts Vladek from his misery.  In the fourth, however, when Vladek responds angrily, trying to refocus on the cause of his misery (likely not to risk the psychological pain of gaining hope only to lose it), the darkness is once again visible through the window.  The priest persists, however, and in the fifth panel, the darkness is again shut out as Vladek begins to have hope again.  The priest inspects Vladek's number and provides him with several reasons the numbers mean Vladek will survive.  The priest could, I'm sure, have come up with positive ways to interpret the six digits on Vladek's arm no matter what each digit actually was, because this priest is determined to view things in a positive way.  The belief he spreads to Vladek allows Vladek to focus not on his surroundings, but on himself, which is paralleled by the fact that Vladek's arm enlarges in each of the three panels in which the priest proclaims the numbers' significance.  As Vladek focuses on what he views as positive, and doesn't allow his surroundings to defeat him, the window stays out of view: focusing in on something hopeful allows Vladek to escape the "panes" the window represents.

What?

            In class, we discussed the unusual word order of the father mouse, Vladek’s, speech in the present-day time stream in Maus, as Vladek remembers the Holocaust.  We suggested that the broken patterns of normal speech represent how Vladek is broken by the Holocaust, as his speech is only awkward in the present (after the horrific events he went through), not in the past events he speaks of (before he was “broken”).  I stretched things a little (or a lot, knowing that Art Spiegelman probably never considered this as he wrote) when I pointed out that the inversion of words is reminiscent of the word order used in communications of the deaf, perhaps symbolizing how people are often deaf to what Vladek and Spiegelman are trying to say.

            One key wording motif, the significance of which escaped me until recently, is Vladek’s persistent use of the word “what” in situations where normal English speakers would never think to place it.  For example, on page 62 of My Father Bleeds History, Vladek narrates “And thought all night different things what could happen to us” (Spiegelman 62).  I suggest that the continuous appearance of “what” in surprising places is meant to stand out to the reader as representing, on a very simplified level, Vladek’s reaction to all he’s lived through: “What?”

            I remember at the start of Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye, which we read last semester, she explains how since Claudia finds the “why” too difficult to contemplate, “one must take refuge in how” (Morrison).  Toni Morrison is, to use a favorite word from our class dialect, “deep” – she makes the “how” seem deeper than many of the “whys” I’ve previously considered.  While Spiegelman doesn’t explicitly issue a statement about the levels of what, how, and why, he makes a point similar to Morrison’s about how living during a terrible event can leave a person struggling to grasp the more basic levels.  Spiegelman leaves the how and why up to his readers, and focuses on presenting the what, forming a basis of fundamental understanding that he hopes will lead to greater understanding.

            One other symbolic topic – while I was packing up after class to leave for sixth hour, one of my friends (obsessed with combat, wars, and weaponry) came in and saw the comic book Maus still on my desk.  He told me that Maus is the name of a German supertank – a fact that I doubt someone writing about the Holocaust and World War II wouldn’t know.  I think Art Spiegelman may have named his book as he did to represent how he wanted it to be a metaphoric super-weapon: to protect his people, to break through the walls of ignorance in peoples’ minds, and to be something that people must notice (I don’t have a supertank on hand, but I assume they’re hard to miss).