Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

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 in 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

Marjane starts to do things she does not want to, which made her into a person who had loosened herself. For example, Marjane smoked with her friends because of solidarity even though she doesn’t want to. This made her feel, “The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules” (Satrapi 193). Marjane does not know what to do anymore, she can’t decide what to do and she felt regretful for her parents that she’s not their dream child after she came to Vienna. Obviously, Marjane was always doing things that she doesn’t want to. All these things she did were just for a temporary love and friendship. And these things will end up with no benefits for her even though how hard she had tried. She joined this group of people just because they look cooler and more popular in the school. But after she found out that it isn’t what she wants, it became suffering for her. This is the reality of the world, she has to force herself to do affairs in order to