Cut Off Their Tails With A Carving Knife

In an article titled  "Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Working-Through The Trauma of the Holocaust" by Robert S. Leventhal, the author explores many different aspect that can be analyzed through Maus. He first discusses the topic of trauma, working through it, and problems of historical understanding This is where he deals with problems like how does one deal with trauma, for example the suicide of Speilgman's mom, or  Aushwitz. He quotes from Winicott saying, " that there must be an empathetic witness to the pain of this traumatic loss, that the person who suffers this loss must be able to give testimony to someone as a way of working-through or processing this loss, and that finally certain "transitional" or "intermediate" objects might be necessary in order to move from the state of dependence and reliance on the Other to a renewed state of self-sufficiency after the traumatic severance." This is an interesting topic that I will most likely bring into my essay. Leventhal then goes on to explore, who would have guessed, POSTMODERNISM in Maus. Here he brings many different lenses to use from Lyotard to books writtten about representing the holocaust. (There is a ton of stuff here.) His next section discusses what he calls Cultural Besetzung, "One of the ways in which a culture betrays (in the sense of "allows to become clear") its own "investments" or Besetzungen, to use Freud's term for the psychic endowment of certain things, is in its priveleging specific ways of thinking and writing, certain forms of presentation, the selection of specific genres as being "apt" or "appropriate" for certain tasks." Finally Leventhal, then begins to actually talk about Maus itself. Even going into the way the comic is drawn. For example, "In a particularly compelling segment of the text, Artie narrates his reaction to his mother's suicide. A comic book within the comic book Maus entitled "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History," this text-within-the-text recounts Artie's own incomplete or failed attempt to work through the trauamatic loss of his mother, his own melancholic and masochistic tendencies to internalize the dysfunction of his family and his mother's depression, and the degree to which his writing bears the mark of that loss and is itself a type of working-through in its own right"  There's some good stuff there.
Also I plan to pull from Maus: A Survivors Tale, for further insight into the novel. & that's what I'm throwing.