Just as the animal metaphor is an attempt to explain an existing social stratification, other aspects of the story seem to suggest that this stratification is a manufactured illusion. This is most clearly illustrated in opening pages of Chapter Two of Book II, which take place after the publication of the first book of Maus. In this narrative, Art Spiegelman is clearly having doubts about the animal metaphors that form the backbone of the story. Here, people are still characterized by animals based on race, but these characterizations are now clearly only masks that have been tied to their heads with a bit of string. Thus the idea of race is only an artifice, Spiegelman suggests, and underneath the masks we are all essentially the same.