SPOTLIGHT OF HITLER: NEVERENDING TRAUMA IN ART SPIEGELMAN’S GRAPHIC NOVEL MAUS
HİTLER'İN SPOT IŞIĞI: ART SPIEGELMAN'IN GRAFİK ROMANI MAUS'TA HİÇ BİTMEYEN TRAVMA

Author : Kenan KOÇAK
Number of pages : 319-328

Abstract

Art Spiegelman is one of the world’s prominent graphic novelists. He published autobiographical two-volume book Maus A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History in 1986 and Maus A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began in 1991, and then combined them in a single book in 2003. In these books, he tells his own ‘trauma’ of ‘holocaust’ within his father’s, Vladek who survived Hitler’s death camp Auschwitz. He uses animals for his characters and draws Jews as mice, and Nazis as cats. Additionally, he depicts Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, British as fish, Gypsies as moths, and Swedes as reindeer. By using interesting chapter titles and metaphors, he successfully tells how ‘holocaust’ affected him. One of his strong metaphors is the spotlight that seen throughout the novel which is interpreted here as Hitler’s torch that projected onto victims, survivors and even their sons and daughters. Obviously, Spiegelman wants to stress that for survivors and their children, forgetting ‘holocaust’ and living without it is impossible. This paper studies the never-ending trauma through metaphors and characters in the above-mentioned graphic novel.

Keywords

Art Spiegelman, Graphic Novel, Holocaust, Trauma

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