Children are constantly learning about themselves and the world around them. As they grow up, their world expands from their home to peers and, eventually, to people and places they know about. Children should learn about themselves and develop a positive self-image if they have to be successful citizens in society. They must learn how different they are as well how alike they are in relation to others. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s childhood growing up in a tumultuous post-revolutionary Iran. Instead of a simple coming-of-age story, Satrapi outlines the social and economic conditions that shaped her childhood and adolescence. The simplicity of a child’s mind and her confusion at adult notions is a constant theme in the book. This is brought forth in Marji’s childlike understanding of the …show more content…
As one grows up, one becomes aware of the need to protect and propagate one’s self-interest, and this then becomes the prime mover and operative principle of one’s life. As for children, they ‘do not know what’s good for them’ and do not understand the consequences of their actions. Thus they are more carefree in their rebellion while the adult takes care not to jeopardize their self- interest over their cherished principles, if they have any. Risk is thus a crucial theme in Persepolis; for Satrapi this is one of the primary distinctions between children and adults. The same philosophical understanding is also what underpins legal jurisprudence that makes a moral distinction between a juvenile offender and an adult offender. The theme of repression is an ever-present issue in Persepolis. The picture on the right shows a bearded Islamist explaining to children why the veil needs to be imposed to counter Westernization. However, Satrapi’s home was a place of liberal values and free expression. This is shown in the scene where Marji is split between
People are like cameras and their personal experiences can be their lenses that change and modify the actual picture. This evident in Marjane Satrapi’s book Persepolis because the whole book is about a girl growing up, and forming her own opinions. Furthermore, Marjane has to mature in the turmoil of an Iranian-Iraqi war, she also has to survive the brutal Islamic regime governing her. This creates a very particular point of view considering that the parents raising Marjane are against the new form of government, and actively protest, risking their lives. As a result, this rubs off on her creating a very rebellious and dauntless little girl, who isn’t afraid of the new oppressors.
Tim LaRocca Persepolis KPA In the book “Persepolis”, the author Marjane Satrapi, uses excellent diction to help the reader obtain knowledge and gain understanding of her main purpose in a specific passage or chapter of the book. Despite her specific word choice, it is challenging for readers to truly understand her main purpose only through literary terms and devices used throughout the book. Therefore, to help increase the readers ability to understand the main purpose of a certain specific passage, Satrapi uses an extensive amount of precise graphic elements. For example, in the passage “Kim Wilde”, Satrapi is able to express her main purpose that when governments tend to restrict the people too much, and become oppressive, the people tend to resist their law and rebel against the law by using the graphic elements of shading and facial expressions to express her purposes in and easier and clearer visual way.
In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi uses drawings to portray daily life in Iran and she makes a lot of contradictions between home life, public life, and the repressive exact regimes on the individual spirit. As it is a graphic novel, the author uses the variety of ways to give readers to look at the culture that Marjane had experienced in her life as well as history of Iran, and the culture of women in the Middle East. The graphic novel has its own literary world and leads the reader to reconsider about how a story can be told in a different way. The images in the graphic novel can present a new style of conversation for the author to communicate with the reader. This kind of technique is very similar to a movie or an artwork such as painting, which shows that each panel can be framed with attention with specific perspective, emotion, position, and setting of the characters.
During the Islamic Revolution, religion was very important to the fundamentalist Islamic regime that took power over the secular state. In her graphic memoir, Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, a spiritual young girl, suffers a deep loss of faith due to the oppressive fundamentalist religion in Iran. This loss of faith causes Marji to experience disillusionment and a loss of identity, which greatly shapes her character. Through her experiences with God, Satrapi comments on the difference between spirituality and fundamentalist religion and displays the negative repercussions of an oppressive religious state.
In Persepolis, a bildungsroman genre graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, the main character experienced many events that made her become fully grown up in Iran, yet the turning point was her life in Vienna. A bildungsroman is a novel that describes the process in which the character grows from child to adult, which he or she has a reason to start a journey while the coming of age is difficult, suffering, uncomfortable, and long. There are many particular events where Marjane has many difficulties on the process of maturity. When Marjane is still a child in Iran, terrible historical events happened around her and formed her to become more mature. Although they made her become a mature child, the real part of her life that changed her were her days in Vienna where she really understood the cruelty of the outside world and herself.
The role of politics in Marjane Satrapi 's life is a critical one, as seen in her graphic novel Persepolis, which narrates her experiences as a young girl raised by revolutionaries during turbulent times in Iran. Particularly, Satrapi uses juxtaposition between her parents and children to highlight the hypocrisy and myopia of the upper class revolutionaries when it comes to the interpretation and implementation of their political ideology. Satrapi builds the foundation of her criticism through the superficial comprehension her child self exhibits regarding her parents '—and, by extension, upper class communists '—ideals, then warns about the dangers that such lack of understanding presents through child soldiers who are fed ideologies and then sent to war. However, while pointing out the shortcomings of the movement, Satrapi 's use of children as the vessels for comparison entails that there is room for the communist community to develop, like Marji does as she matures from child to teen, and encourage equality through the removal of social barriers created through binaristic thinking to truly promote communist ideals. The first point of juxtaposition is Marji herself, particularly her initial myopic thinking as a child.
Imagine if everyone had a pre-determined negative image about you? This is what life was like for Marji, the protagonist of the novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The book is set in the year 1980, in Iran where Islam was a major religion at the time. This is also the time for the Islamic Revolution which kicked the Shau out of office and made Iran a theocracy. In Persepolis, Satrapi challenges negative stereotypes about Iranians through important characters who oppose the Islamic Regime.
In Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, she utilizes this novel in way to overcome the barriers between those who want long novels and those who favor visual representations. This grants readers a unifying and jointed medium that bridges the gap between different types of readers— engaging a wider audience as a genre. Satrapi’s extraordinary story gives us an autobiographic account of her life growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Satrapi’s representation of her childhood self illuminates her relationship with her parents and others, depicting herself as bold and honest even in the face of adversity. Though she doesn’t subscribe to the beliefs of Islam like others, she utilizes this to think for herself.
Clothing and fashion as a marker of cultural identity in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, presents the central tension of Marjane struggling with the relationship of her nationality and herself by seeing the transition of clothing, makeup and accessories that female characters wear in the book. During her teenage years, she had been to a lot of countries and she always felt like she couldn 't find her real identity, either as a westerner or an Iranian. The book presents a lot of struggles with her trying to figure out her relationship, nationality, and her identity.
Where boys and girls were together” (Satrapi 4). However, in 1980 the Revolution came and every aspect of life had changed. While the boys were in one classroom the girls were in another. Satrapi explains how at this time of the Islamic Revolution
In talking about her childhood experiences, Satrapi narrates how her family survived the political and social crises of Iran and how it impacted their family. The ideological and political differences of Satrapi’s family from the prevailing culture of Iran have threatened to cause divisions within the family. Satrapi, herself, was sent by her parents abroad to avoid persecution from Iran’s culture police. Other salient features of family themed children literature is the element of growing up. Just like Satrapi’s Persepolis, children literature such as the famous Ugly Duckling and the Archie and Veronica series, for instance, have elements of growing up combined with family
The Complete Persepolis Reflective Statement My knowledge and understanding of the contextual and cultural considerations in Marjane Satrapi’s novel, The Complete Persepolis, enhanced greatly through the individual oral presentations my fellow classmates displayed. The main struggles I encountered were entwined with the subject of war within the time of the novel. The war impacted Marjane’s life significantly and shaped the person she became. One of my classmates helped me comprehend and grasp the concept of how the war was never wanted but rather gained.
Effects on the Memoir Persepolis Marjane Satrapi’s novel Persepolis describes experiences during the Islamic Regime that leave people suffering, dying, and fighting for a better government. Marjane Satrapi uses a comic layout to illustrate what is difficult to say in words. Her panel design depicts images of her, her family, and friends as well as how people in the community are reacting to the different events of the revolution. The use of panel design assists the memoir by making Satrapi’s purpose of portraying information more successful. Throughout the novel Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi uses panel design to advance the reader 's’ knowledge of the many situations occurring in Iran that cause distress to many individuals rebelling against the regime.
Persepolis The story of Marjane’s childhood consists series of stories that suggest how the period of time she lived through was exceptional because through thousands of years in Iran, nothing similar happened. Marjane witnessed in her childhood extreme events like the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi-Iranian war and the new life with the new Islamic Republican regime which has changed her everyday life. Witnessing her uncle Anoosh being executed robustly has shaken her emotions and faith upside down. Marjane’s story of her childhood and adulthood is not a normal innocent life, but It was a time of controversial ideologies, violence, and radical changes that caused some their lives and gave some no option but to leave Iran including Marjane.
Images can evoke strong human emotion, both positive and negative, and Marjane Satrapi effectively uses graphic images to symbolize events in her life and to tell the reader of her deep, moving story of nationalism, social classes, and the loss of innocence. The use of images to symbolize important events in a story is a beneficial strategy that can be seen throughout the book. Topics that play huge roles in Persepolis are nationalism (one’s pride of their country), social classes (the separation of the rich and poor), and the loss of innocence (when a person loses their naive nature to the corruptness of the world). These ideas shape the story through persuading people’s actions. For example, nationalism gives people the courage to stand up for their country, as Marjane’s family did during the war.