Throughout Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Jews are represented as mice, while non-Jewish Germans are represented as cats. All characters of a single “nationality” are drawn virtually identically, with only their clothing or other details to help distinguish between them. In making people of a single nationality look “all alike,” Spiegelman showed the absurdity of dividing people by these lines: “These metaphors… are meant to self-destruct in my book — and I think they do self-destruct.”