Bug Bites

    "Time Flies," is the title of the second chapter of Art Spiegelmann's MAUS Volume 2.  Immediately, the chapter sets a different tone and breaks from the normalcy of the previous chapters.  Previously, Spiegelman would portray a time in the past where he interviewed his father who recited his own past during the holocaust.    However this chapter takes us to the true present for the first time, and is very meta.  

    Art is exhausted, and is currently writing and drawing the book we are reading.  He recites the years of many events relevant to the story, including the year Vladek died, which is the first time we go this far forward in time.  Art is wearing a mask of a mouse, but underneath he is human, which is unlike the rest of the book (where they are all just humanoid animals).  In the rest of the chapter set in this present, all other characters are humans with the masks of the animals of their respective ethnicities/nationalities.  He questions his own metaphor in this chapter, as perhaps he believes the masks people put up as their identity doesn't change that everyone is a human.  Or maybe he wants to differentiate that this chapter is not the same as the rest of the book, to show that it is written in the present, rather than being a recitation of the past.

  

    However, most importantly, we see the flies (Time flies), which represent the past, buzzing around, biting, and irritating Art, as the bodies of the holocaust under him decompose as he writes.    They return in the end of the chapter to the same effect.  The flies show how intergenerational trauma can work against people who never experienced the holocaust themselves, but how they are affected by the weight of what the people before them have experienced.