An Innocent Child In Marji's Persepolis

An innocent child can be looked at in many ways. One who acts as a innocent child may be trying to deceive someone, or they may not know what is going on at all. In Persepolis, Marji, a young girl, is stuck in many situations where being herself would not benefit her. She acts and hides herself in the form that she is a innocent child and isn’t doing anything wrong. Marji uses this mask to deceive others by being physically innocent and cover up for her un-influenced imagination,

Marji, being a young girl still growing up, tries to learn as much as possible about her war-torn surroundings. However, in doing this, she still doesn’t understand or figure everything out. This means that there is not as much outside influence on her imagination, causing her to believe and dream about things that only young children think about. At one point, when Marji is growing up, she wants to become a prophet. She says, “I wanted to be a prophet because...”(6). Marji doesn't know yet that it isn’t possible to become a prophet and demonstrates her innocence by not knowing this. Another instance where Marji doesn’t understand the truth is when she has to wear a veil. She says, “”We didn’t really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to wear it.”(3) Instead of wearing it as instructed, Marji and the other kids play around with it and do other stuff with the veil, as they are still children and don’t understand why. Lastly, Marji also demonstrates her childhood innocence when she talks to God. She uses him

In these situations, Marji acts like an innocent child when she doesn’t know how to do something. In turn, she can deceive people for her own good, as well as cover up for the things she doesn’t know and understand yet. Without Marji being able to put on this mask, she and her family could’ve had some very different outcomes than the ones they