Maus and Ethics

The story of Maus is one that is important to be told, but ethically, any story of it's kind can be tricky.

The biggest ethical dilemmas of a memoir are issues of truthfulness. Essentially boiling down to the following:

Metaphor: Acceptable when obvious. The author didn't mean that Nazis were literally cats, and that Jews were literally mice, and any reader able to handle the material would reasonably understand the metaphor.

Embellishment: Inappropriate, generally. In something like Persepolis, embellishment comes with the unreliable nature of a child's memory. In Maus, we don't know what could be embellished, but it's my suspicion that the father's ex-girlfriend didn't actually get on the ground and beg him to marry her.

Self-Image of the protagonist - Part of embellishment, but perhaps a little more subtle, sometimes, authors change stories to remove elements of their lives where they made mistakes or acted unkind. This is clearly not the case in Maus, as evidenced by the father's disdain for his second wife. It is also not the case in Persepolis, where the author includes the bits about chasing a boy with nails.

Representations of others - The other side of the protagonist's self image is the way he describes other people, whether it is in a good or bad light, and whether that light is an accurate representation of the others. In most cases, we don't get to know what others think about their representations unless they happen to be alive to tell their own story. A good example of this from recent history is the case of Woody Allen, who had abuse allegations levied at him from one of his children, but another one of his children defended him, saying that Mia Farrow had brainwashed the memory of abuse into her child. It is impossible to know which story is true, but knowing there are different interpretations of the same events leads to a greater degree of skepticism in the reader.

Factual Accuracy - It's very important to be able to recognize that sometimes, people's memories don't match the history books. Therefore the question for a memoirist is whether information should be presented as remembered or should it be fact checked when it comes to verifiable things? In most cases, I'd say that the "author's truth" is more important than the "historical truth", so long as it does not stray too far from reality.