SOURCE: Wilner, Arlene Fish. “‘Happy, Happy Ever After’: Story and History in Art Spiegelman's Maus.” Journal of Narrative Technique 27, no. 2 (spring 1997): 171-89.

In the following essay, Wilner observes that Maus employs a variety of ironic juxtapositions to examine the unique difficulties of representing the Holocaust, such as the escapism associated with the comic book genre versus the grim realities of the World War II.

Although George Santayana's injunction—to remember the past lest we be condemned to repeat it—has become a cliché, more recent students of history have observed that the study of the past does not necessarily provide insurance against its reiteration. Hayden White, for example, suggests that “[n]othing is better suited to lead to a repetition of the past than a study of it that is either reverential or convincingly objective in the way that conventional historical studies tend to be” (Content 82). Similarly, Cynthia...