Maus II

Maus has many themes inter-twined within it. One being the obvious totalitarian governments are bad, and the holocaust should never happen again, or anything like it. There is also the stand point that is shown time and time again that any recounting of these stories do not represent the entire event as a whole. This is because many different people had many different experiences, and the dead people had a different experience all together and those stories can never be told. This PDF file: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center/pdfs/BERLAT1.PDF written about subjects similar to this topic tells how Speigelman is conscious of the ease in which people take narratives such as his, and say that is the entire story. That this is what the holocaust was all about for all people involved. Through the usage of constantly showing his internal conflict with sharing the story at all because of the danger of his narrative becoming the "truth" for people about the holocaust. This is also an example of postmodern theory in that he is rejecting the idea that there is one truth about the holocaust or one grand narrative that can completely tell the whole story. He is also showing this when he puts on the mouse mask. He is making the reader completely aware of the fact that though he is telling this story, and doing his best to represent the feelings and sentiments and hardships of those that were there, he was not one of the pople that was there. He is doing his best to represent the real thing, but he is not in the end the real thing. Making the reader constantly aware of this shows how hard he tries to represent his father's story, but even he cannot fully represent what his father felt because he is not his father.