http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/maus.htm
The article that I found about Maus is from Ian Johnston. This literary criticism was given in a lecture at Malaspina University-College. I chose this article because I like some of the points that Johnston makes in his analysis of the book. His opinion on the novel is that "Maus I and II are not (and should not be approached exclusively as) another Holocaust-survivor narrative, but are rather an attempt to confront a collateral issue: How does one make sense of a Holocaust narrative? Or, more particularly, how does one, as an artist and the child of Holocaust victims (and thus someone with deeply personal and permanent emotional roots in those horrific events), make imaginative sense of the Holocaust?" (Johnston). I agree with this analysis because I do believe that Spiegelman did not write this book simply to retell the story of the Holocaust, which we have heard so many times; it rather asks the reader questions like Johnston introduced. It looks deeper into the effects of the Holocaust for the survivors and/or their children.
Johnston also continues to analyze the characters of the story and gives his opinion on why Vladek should not be considered the main character. Vladek is not a very complex figure in Maus, in fact "He survives largely as a matter of luck (combined with a good native intelligence), but his experiences have left him crippled emotionally, and he has learned nothing particularly momentous as a result of his experiences—there's little sense that he understands or has even attempted to understand his experiences and their effects on him." (Johnston). This again shows how Maus is not another retelling of the Holocaust story. If it was, sure Vladek would be the main character because most of the story is retelling his experiences in the Holocaust; however, in my opinion, Maus was written to emphasize the effects the Holocaust made on the survivors and the understanding of those, but Vladek was lucky and has learned nothing from his experiences.
