SOURCE: Budick, Emily Miller. “Forced Confessions: The Case of Art Spiegelman's Maus.” Prooftexts 21, no. 3 (fall 2001): 379-98.

In the following essay, Budick explores how Maus violates certain “taboos” of Holocaust literature and how Spiegelman's subjective narrative perspective offers unique insight into the humanistic aspects of the Holocaust.

We aren't even past the first chapter of Art Spiegelman's Maus when the father exacts a promise from the son that the son will violate over and over again in the writing of his text. Certain “private things, I don't want you should mention,” Vladek admonishes his son.¹ From beginning to end, Maus violates that promise. Indeed, the violation first occurs in a kind of negative speech act in which the assertion of the son's words “I promise” is abrogated in the narrative's breaking of that promise. From its inception, then, the text as text constitutes a sustained act of violation: a...