Point of View

The graphic text is presented in the first-person, limited, point of view which is naturally appropriate for an autobiographic and biographical memoir. Artie Spiegelman, the artist and author, appears in the text as a meta-textual narrator. He spends several days interviewing Vladek Spiegelman, his father, about Vladek's experiences surviving the Holocaust and its aftermath. The point of view utilized gives the work an incredibly personal tone and lends it an immediacy that transcends the historical nature of World War II and gives a compelling personal horror to the genocide of millions. Indeed, the text's point of view is vital to its success and contributes materially to the accessibility and power of the narrative.

Within Artie's first-person narrative, Vladek acts as a secondary narrative in a very complex structure of autobiographical biography. That is, each typical segment of the text begins with Artie as the primary individual...