Maus II - Time Flies

After going through the first Maus book, we recognize that Art Spiegelman has created a unique comic style of representing different groups of people as different animals. Since it is primarily a story of a "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust, we connect his art style to characters/people of the WWII era.

In the beginning of the second chapter of Maus II, we see something that is different from anything we have seen before of Spiegelman. He displays himself as an actual human being that is wearing a mouse mask. I believe at this point he is showing that he accepts the fact that his life is very different from his parents' lives. He comes from a very challenged family, but he grew up in a relatively average American household, and has had a self-described "easy" life. He has been showing his readers (to a certain degree) what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany through the eyes of his father, Vladek. Obviously, the reader did not get first-hand experience of the Holocaust, but neither did Spiegelman. He's showing that by wearing the mask. He's been viewing this experience through Vladek's eyes as well, and now he is feeling kind of guilty about it. He's just an average guy, an average American, with a pretty good life. His book is selling well and is having a child soon, but after listening to his father's stories, he is feeling depressed about what his parents had to go through.