A picture is worth a thousand words

As we all may know up to this point, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus depicts the story of his father's life during the Holocaust.

Spiegelman tried to understand the events that Jewish people had to go through, however, he was not able to so. As his father final commentary on the strip "nobody can understand", let us readers acknowledge that no matter how many books or historical reports we may read, we would never get the whole story, the emotions that all those sentenced Jewish had live up until the day in which they were assassinated. Despite of that, Art challenged himself to translate this moment of history through the experience of his father into a novel that will give that extra support, that is, the feeling of engaging with the suffering.

How would he do so? By narrating through images. Images can express ideas that go beyond written texts, these reduce the readers change of misundertanding the information that is being provided throughout the story. Probably if Spiegelman has written the novel in a traditional block text format, the way we have perceived it would have probably been quite different - how so?- due to the fact that images induce us to capture the essence of the author's ideas and feelings. In addition, Maus is the perfect combination of the art of literature with visual art.

Now, taking the previous into account, the depiction of humans beings as animals, especially the "cat-mouse metaphor" as Spiegelman called it, is a realization of his own family history, the cat's nature of being a hunter seeking to murder mice, no matter if these little creatures did everything in their power so that they would not be found, the cat's cunning was always a step ahead. 

Take a look at this video and try to think about the following:

• If cats represented power and authority, would have mice been able to fight against their natural predator?
• Can you project this animal realization of humans to any particular event that has taken place nowadays?
• Can you associate the feeling of oppression experienced in the Holocaust to a light-weighted version, of course, of today's society?