Post 12 - Davis

The first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus is absolutely packed with moments exemplifying pathos on many levels, though the one instance in particular that comes immediately to my mind is featured on pages 102-105, wherein the reader is presented with an earlier work by Spiegelman detailing the aftermath of his mother's suicide. I find this excerpt to be particularly significant because it provides new, thorough insight regarding Art's nervous breakdown/depression, giving a new depth to everything the reader has seen thus far. The comic also contains a direct illustration of the events that I believe act as the final and primary catalyst for Vladek's transformation into the stingy, deprecative old man that readers now know him as. It one of the very few places in the novel where such thorough detail is given regarding Art's mother's suicide, an extremely important plot point which haunts every character in the novel in some way or another.