In Art Spiegelman's visual text, "Maus: A Survivor's Tale", the story was told through the medium of a comic strip. Maus was inspired by Art Spiegelman's family who were directly involved in the holocaust. The relationship between Art and his father Vladek is portrayed through the dialogue between the two characters, ultimately portraying Art's interest in his father's hardships he had faced. Although Art was not involved directly involved with the holocaust he lives through his father's experiences and stories he was told from the Holocaust. How the story switches back and forth from the past and the present allows Vladek to tell the story but also include his personal comments about how he felt towards certain incidents that had occurred. The Author created this piece to provide an insight on the effect the holocaust had on the survivors and their families through the use of symbolism, color, perspective and structure. 

Spiegelman uses symbolism in the comic to explain the Holocaust in a deeper meaning. The mice in the story symbolize the Jewish people. Mice are unwanted animals/ pest which people try to get rid of or exterminate. The cats symbolize the Germans. Cats are ironically known for preying on mice for food and being dominant over mice. This is significant because the Germans controlled the Jewish people and forced them into interment camps. Cats will play around with their prey until they decide to kill them and eat them. This idea directly relates to the Jewish people in the story in that the Germans would group together large Jewish communities and send them to interment camps. There they would be worked until death or be killed because of the large quantities of Jewish people being held in the internment camps. Spiegelman's use characterization of the cats and mice allows for the events of the Holocaust to be told to a younger audience and hold a less serious meaning. The black and white contrast of the comic frame helps contrast the different animal figures throughout the novel.

In the comic frame, the gloomy black and white colors of the comic directly relate to the thoughts and feelings of the Holocaust. When one thinks of the Holocaust, images of death and cruelty would come to mind. Colorful images are not included in this comic frame because that would insinuate that there was happiness related to the holocaust. Families were spilt up and millions were killed. People such as Art who were not alive through the Holocaust lived through the holocaust through his father's stories and emotions of the tragic historic event. The colors black and white are contradicting in that white is the sign of purity while black is a sign of power/ control. Black relates to the German cats power over the Jewish mice. White is a sense of hope for the mice to be either reunited with lost family members, or hope they would not be sent off to the internment camps. The colors used in the comic directly relate to Spiegelman's perspective and tone within the comic.

"Maus: A Survivor's Tale" was told through the perspective of Art Spiegelman's father Vladek. For Spiegelman he lived through his father's stories and created his own emotions towards the subject. The third person point of view used in the comic allows Spiegelman to focus of his father Vladek's story. This perspective creates a person connection to all that occurred during the Holocaust verse someone who tells the story based off of knowledge they had from reading about the Holocaust. When Mala, Vladek's second wife, speaks of Vladek towards the end of the cartoon you can sense her frustration towards Vladek and how Art wants nothing to do with the negativity.

The comic is structured with boxes of varying sizes. The use of square boxes instead of circles or other varying shapes allows for a clean cut message. Organization of a comic is very important because the layout of the text also helps tell the story. The conversation bubbles are outlined in different shapes. Speech messages with alarming messages are jagged while the normal explanatory bubbles have smooth outlines. The jaggedness creates a sense of urgency and also catches the readers eye. Inside the comic the text varies from being in speech bubbles, to structured boxes explain what is going on inside the window and text spoken from Vladek. Comic windows also vary in size throughout the comic. Larger comic windows depict detailed images with deeper meanings, such as the window on the top of page of 138. The text box explains how all of the Jewish people had to gather to get their passports stamped. In the window you see the large mass of people and the Nazi flag in the background which allows the reader to see how big of a deal it was to Spiegelman's father. 

Art Spiegelman's use of symbolism, color, perspective and structure in his visual text, "Maus: A Survivor's Tale", easily relates the Holocaust to the reader. In the text, Spiegelman takes the topic of the holocaust and its effect it had on his father and portrays it in a way which is less serious then it would be if actual photography had been used. The symbolism used to create a deeper meaning of the cats and mice depicted the Jewish people and Germans in a different light then they would have been viewed if drawn as normal people. Through that depiction one can relate to the dominance of the Germans over the Jewish people with the known nature of cats having control over mice and them being their prey. Spiegelman's choice of creating the comic in black and white instead of color also relates to the negativity related to the Holocaust and unhappiness. Black and white paints a grime photo of how horrible things had been.  The clean, organized structure of the text allows a clean read so the reader can easily understand the meaning of the story. Lastly, perspective was used in this visual text to tell Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek's, story of the Holocaust from his personal experiences.

