Maus

A large potion of the drawings in Maus deal with imprisonment for its characters, especially with the motif of lines. There is another motif, however, that shows the state of the Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. Best represented on page 59 in the second volume of Maus, the bunk beds that the Jewish prisoners sleep on are box-shaped, and resemble cages when viewed from a vertical perspective,  as shown in the seventh panel of page 59. Cages very much represent what the Jewish people are feeling about their predicament. They are being observed and poked and prodded like animals at the zoo, where the Germans are the humans, and the Jewish people are the wild animals. This ties into the German common slur for Jewish people being rat, as lab rat describes the state of the Jewish people being tested on. This idea of boxes and cages can be seen wildly throughout most of volume two of Maus. From the drawing of the locations to the backgrounds of the quarters, the concentration camps are surrounded by boxes that they use to keep the Jewish prisoners in. Again, this is like a cage because it is separating the Germans and the Jews like you would put a dog in a cage. It represents the inhumane treatment of the Jewish people, and the fact that they were seen as lesser than. This motif goes along with the lines ever-present in this novel, the imprisonment and state of the Jewish people constantly encompassing them and reminding them of their state of living.