Spiegelman responded with a letter to the editor: 'if you list were divided into literature and non-literature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent that 'fiction' indicates a work isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author, I believe I might have lopped several years off the thirteen I devoted to my two-volume project if I could have taken a novelist's license while searching for a novelist's structure' (Doherty 69)
But you have to struggle for life." (Spiegelman) The book goes at having readers comprehend the complicated nature of the Holocaust, of surviving this event, and of being able to continue to live even as a person who is related to an individual who survived the Holocaust