Yet this in turn feeds into a sense of guilt in the next generation, represented by his son, who is aware ”that his entire project may itself be premised on the destruction of his mother’s memoirs, their displacement and violation.“ Young, ”The Holocaust as Vicarious Past,“ 686. Either a sense of guilt, or the need for truth, prevents him from covering over Anja’s story entirely. However, it is notable that Vladek could not be totally silent on the topic of the diaries, despite having been their destroyer.

Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997 ), 35. Marianne Hirsch reads the diaries’ destruction as part of a pattern of silenced female voices in and around Maus. Efraim Sicher, 276–94 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 280. This in turn symbolizes the absence at the heart of all Holocaust narration, as ”for every survivor story that is spoken and heard, another remains unvoiced, forever lost.“ Sara Horowitz, ”Auto/biography and Fiction after Auschwitz: Probing the Boundaries of Second-Generation Aesthetics,“ in Breaking Crystal: History and Memory after Auschwitz, ed. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New York: Yale University Press, 2000), 31. Young has seen as a void at the heart of Maus’: Anja’s story. The angry accusations hurled at the mother by the son, and the corresponding silence in the other direction, serve to emphasize what James E. I am adopting what has already become widespread convention in writing about this text by referring to the protagonist as Artie to distinguish him from the author. Hamida Bosmajian, “The Orphaned Voice in Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II,” Literature and Psychology 44 (1998): 7–8.

Young, “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 669. Hugh Frey and Benjamin Noys, “History in the Graphic Novel,” Rethinking History 6, no.

Maus I by Art Spiegelman