Graphic novels pose a unique challenge for the narratologist. As Gerald Prince notes in the preface to his Dictionary of Narratology, the privileging of verbal over nonverbal elements of narrative is one of the biases of narratology itself (vii). Robert Harvey, in his introduction to The Art of the Comic Book, reports a similar prejudice when literary critics talk about comics: "the emerging critical canon is consequently laced with discussions of plot, character development, and all the rest of the apparatus of literary criticism. But this approach ignores the narrative function of the pictures in comics" (3). These observations suggest that a narratological method specific to the graphic novel must take into account the narrative forms that define it: both the content and the artwork contained in the panels.

Using Art Spiegelman's acclaimed graphic narrative, Maus, as a case study, I will argue that the pictorial and graphic elements of Maus, rather than merely illustrating the story related in its verbal/textual content, serve important and distinct narrative functions. These include: 1) providing transitional elements to move the narrative from one scene to the next; 2) using iconic visual symbols to foreground important material and to enrich the meaning of the narrative; 3) negotiating between the temporalities of the verbal/textual narration; and 5) condensing or eliding the information which would otherwise appear in the verbal/textual narrative.

For the narratologist, learning to read for these purely visual devices must be the first step towards developing a poetics of the graphic narrative. Perhaps then critics will see graphic novels in the light suggested by Will Eisner, as "deploying images and words, each in exquisitely balanced proportion" and contributing to "the body of literature that concerns itself with the examination of the human experience" (142).