IO Text 2

1. extract

The extract from ‘Maus’ is taken from ‘Prisoner on the Hell Planet’, an inserted comic strip written by Spiegelman in response to his mother’s suicide. In this extract, Spiegelman firstly, conflates time to reveal the capacity for family trauma to transcend generations and secondly, applies images of entrapment to suggest a cyclicality to family suffering.

2. extract

In the extract, Art consistently wears the Auschwitz uniform, a potent symbol of his families dehumanizing Holocaust experiences. In wearing this historically symbolic uniform, Art conflates time to put himself in a position of trauma comparable to that of his father. In doing so, he alludes to the transferral of trauma throughout his family, despite his separation from the holocaust itself. The repetitive portrayal throughout each panel emphasises that his family’s past during the Holocaust is now an ever-present aspect of Art’s identity.

3. extract

A motif of Art conflating time in this extract begins to emerge, as in panel 2, Art expresses childhood guilt, depicted in striped pyjamas with stiff lines present within his clothing, face, and setting, resembling prison bars, that symbolise his emotional confinement. This suggests that just as his father was physically entrapped in a prison, he has become emotionally imprisoned in the trauma of his family’s past. The temporal blurring in the panel underscores the persistent feelings of entrapment and intergenerational trauma, spanning from Art's childhood to the present.

4. extract

This feeling of entrapment is verbalised by Art as in panel 5, speaking to Anja he states that, ‘YOU put me here… shorted all my circuits… cut my nerve endings… and crossed my wires!’ The use of cumulative listing of metaphorical physical debilitations hyperbolises the impact of his mother’s suicide, as it pervades his psychology to the extent of the feeling of physical debilitation.

5. extract

Thus, visual features and textual devices portray the ongoing impact of familial trauma through the conflation of time and its constricting impact on Art.