When considering a historical event like the Holocaust, a person that did not endure the brutality of such an event will never be able to fully understand the life-altering effects a survivor will suffer from. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a graphic novel written through Artie Spiegelman’s point of view. Artie is the son of Vladek Spiegelman, a Holocaust survivor. In stories, like Vladek Spiegelman, his life is forever changed by his survival of the Holocaust, which in turn affects his relationships with friends and family, especially his son, Artie. Throughout the novel, Artie illustrates his father’s stories and memories of his survival and bring life to them through graphic drawings, which depict the Jewish people as mice while the Nazi’s are illustrated as cats, showing that the Jews were thought of as the scum of the earth caught by their tails in the Nazi’s defenseless trap: the concentration camps.
In the graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Artie Spiegelman and his father, Vladek Spiegelman, undergo several challenges, similar to the ones discussed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but their stories cannot fully follow the hero’s journey because Artie leaves out some of the steps allowing Vladek’s story to be brought to life and feel more like a story rather than a fairy tale, neither one of them would become a hero without the illustrations of Vladek’s experience of surviving the Holocaust, the conflicts they face against each other while discussing the events, and the steps of the hero’s journey that they each of them undergo.
For Vladek Spiegelman, the ordinary world, or the known, is being with his wife, Anja, and working in his textile factory. For Artie, the known world is New York and a world distant from his father. Both Vladek and Artie have a call to adventure. “This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the ‘call to adventure’ —signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity to a zone unknown” (Campbell 53). Vladek’s call to adventure occurs when he receives a letter telling him that he would be drafted into the Polish Reserves Army.
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Vladek refuses of his call is decided for him when his father tries to make his health so terrible that they would not approve him. The extreme measures taken by Vladek’s father worked. Vladek stated, “For three months I ate only salted herring and no water to lose weight” (Spiegelman 46). Artie’s call to adventure occurs when he is skating with some friends and he is left behind. He comes home crying to his father. His father says, “If you locked them in a room together for a week with no food, then you could see what it is, friends” (Spiegelman 6)!
This statement introduces his father’s survival. Artie and his father begin their discussion on his survival years later when Artie goes to visit him in Rego Park for the first time in years (Spiegelman 11). Artie says, “For the next few months, I went and visited my father” (Spiegelman 26). Artie does not have a refusal. Instead, he jumps at the idea to write about his father without considering the consequences. This is important because if a hero does not refuse the call, they have not followed the journey. The hero never made the transition into the unknown, which means they do not return changed. “For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero’s journey is with a protective figure who provides the adventurer with amulets” (Campbell 63).
Vladek does not have a direct meeting with his mentor, but his grandfather serves as a mentor to him. Vladek has a dream about his grandfather. In the dream, his grandfather gives him hope of freedom to not only Vladek but other Jewish prisoners of war as well. In his dream, his grandfather states, ‘You will come out of this place free on the day of Parshas Truma’ (Spiegelman 57). Vladek is also given hope by a fellow prisoner, who tells Vladek that the sum of his prison number, 18, is significant in the Jewish culture and stands for life in Hebrew. Vladek is also aided by his own traits and abilities. Vladek gets some favors by giving English lessons to the Polish Kapo. Because of his own abilities, he is given a better job, a better place to live, better clothes, and more food while at Auschwitz. Artie’s supernatural aid is his wife. She is kind and intelligent. She serves as a way for Art to discuss his relationship with his father and the Holocaust.
Once a hero has been called an refused the call, they will eventually cross the first threshold. “With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power” (Campbell 71). Vladek reaches the first threshold when he and Anja escaped the registration at the Dienst stadium, where they get a glimpse of how treacherous the journey to freedom would be. Artie does not have a threshold. Next, in the hero’s journey, is the belly of the whale. “The hero is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (Campbell 83).
Vladek is fully in the belly of the whale when he and Anja were caught, by the Gestapo, while trying to hide at various places until they made it the Sosnowiec. He says, ‘we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew from here we will not come out anymore…’ (Spiegelman 157). Artie reaches the belly when he calls his father a “murderer” for burning Anja’s diaries (Spiegelman 159). Vladek is now fully in the unknown and Artie begins to question whether he is qualified to tell this story because he did not live through it.
Like experiencing the transition from the known to unknown, Vladek and Artie undergo the process and challenges of Campbell’s second part, Initiation. The first step in initiation is the road of trials (Campbell 100). Vladek is on the road of trials while he is at Auschwitz. While at Auschwitz, Vladek is able to smuggle food and messages to Anja while working in a tin shop but his is eventually caught and transferred into “black work,” but after three months he returns to the tin shop. Artie is on the road of trials as he makes amends with his father, after calling him a murderer, and as he copes with his father’s annoyances of needing assistance and wanting him to stay with him.
Both Artie and Vladek reach the abyss at the time of someone else’s death. For Vladek, he loses his wife Anja to suicide after the survival of the Holocaust. For Artie, he struggles with his father’s death. Vladek is in a constant inner battle with his archetypal evil, his upbringing and experience of the Holocaust and the Nazis. Unlike having to an evil person or being, Artie fights with his father on wasting food. Once a hero reaches the abyss, he reaches “a pattern of the divine state, apotheosis” (Campbell 139).
Artie does not have apotheosis because he feels he is inadequate to tell his father’s story. He feels he will never be able to understand why his father acts the way he does or what his father went through because he did not endure the Holocaust, like his father. Vladek can never reaches apotheosis because of his racist tendencies. While driving around one day with Artie and his wife, they see a black hitchhiker. Vladek says, “it’s a colored guy…push on the gas quick” (Spiegelman 98). He is unable to understand that his actions of racism are similar to the actions the Nazi’s took against the Jewish people. Vladek does obtain his ultimate boon when he is finally reunited with Anja. Artie achieves his ultimate boon by telling his father’s story.
Although returning home would seem like the ideal situation, Vladek return is influenced by his experiences. Often a hero “may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without” (Campbell 192). Vladek is rescued from without when he meets his new wife Mala. He also undergoes Campbell’s next step, crossing the return threshold, near the same time, when Vladek marries Mala. Although Vladek is never fully able to forget the Holocaust, Mala makes it easier and reminds Vladek of love. Artie crosses the return threshold when he returns home to Florida.
Next it would appear that Artie has become a master of two worlds gaining “freedom to pass back and forth across the world division” when he finishes writing his father’s story, but he is not able to reach mastery because Artie never fully immersed himself into the unknown, so he only knows his ordinary world (Campbell 212). Campbell’s next step is freedom to live. Campbell states, “the goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will” (Campbell 221). Vladek never reconciles the freedom to live because he is affected by the Holocaust. He does not waste food and wears old clothes. Artie never reconciles the freedom to live because his father, unfortunately, dies before the second part of the graphic novel is published.
Throughout the graphic novel, Artie illustrates his father’s stories and memories of his survival and bring life to them through graphic drawings. Unfortunately, neither Vladek nor Artie reconcile the freedom to live, ultimately showing that such a catastrophic event not only affects the one involved for the timespan of the event but inevitably changing their life and their family’s life forever. Vladek story shows that no one is truly free. They may be physically free, but their mind is forever scared and trapped in the past.
