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QC Forum Book Group - Maus Discussion Thread

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JD:
Yeah you just pointed out my favorite part of the book. As for your mysterious last person, I have no clue. Perhaps he's a lawyer?

JD:
I actually read this a month or so before we picked it out, yet I couldn't bring myself to read it again. Forgive me if my memory on particular details is a bit hazy.

Inlander:
I thought he was just a short-muzzled dog, like a bulldog or something - certainly that's what he looks like to me in the first panel he appears in. Which would make him American, which fits in with his stereotypical ruthless capitalist/consumerist language.

Eris:
I think I just assumed it was a dog mask as well, just with little non-floppy ears that curl up the side of the hat? It made sense when looking at what the character says and the choice of vocabulary, at least in my mind.

I like the idea of using animals to comment on the ridiculousness of racial division, and I think I kinda thought that way when i first had a cursory look at Maus in one of my literature classes, but when I explained it to est he mentioned that it was a bit of a clichéd idea, with the mice being pursued and punished by cats and all that. I guess that kinda stuck in my head, because I actually noticed things like that more the further I got into the book and it was a bit distracting.


I got this for christmas, and read it then, but it seems I need to read it again, because I had to check things that have been mentioned already, and the discussion has hardly started yet!

a pack of wolves:
But the heads are generally so uniform. There's a reason Art and Francoise are always in the same outfits, without them they'd be pretty interchangeable. Spiegelman's superb at using minute differences in shape to denote the identity of characters, but you're still relying on context and clothing a lot of the time to know who's who. If that is a dog mask (and I agree he'd make sense as a dog) why is he the only dog to deviate from the long muzzle? Others don't get their racial masks altered by character. And those teeth look too human to be canines. Do we even see anyone but the Germans with teeth? The Americans Vladek meets after escaping don't have any.

I realise at this point I'm probably not going to ever come across an answer that satisfies me. I've been puzzling over those four panels for two or three years by now, ever since my girlfriend asked me about it, but I still like the puzzle.

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