Persepolis Reflective Statement In the graphic novel Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi incorporates the theme of rebellion throughout the novel. She emphasizes that rebellion is key to her coming of age story and is important to everyone’s coming of age story. The first sign of rebellion is when she wants to be a prophet, women didn’t work, let alone become prophets, she establishes in this moment that she was different from everyone else. Her parents play an important role in her rebellion, they encourage her to rebel, to be “avant garde” (6/1).
Reflective Statement During the oral discussion, the students discussed intepretators and different ideas for their different views on the graphic novel Persepolis. There were an ample amount of tangent within the conversation per topic. Even with the tangents, the main topics that were discussed and reviewed were the students opinion on Persepolis, how others might have different interpretations of the book, as well as the effects the book had by being written in a different language. The interactive oral changes my perception and interpretation on the novel by a nonsignificant amount the points made did the interpretation just by a hint.
In Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, The Stranger by Albert Camus, and the current college process that I am engulfed in, existentialism proves itself to be true. Existentialism is intimidating until an overarching lesson is learned through the choices and responsibilities, passions (or lack thereof), and the isolation of a person, such as Marjane, Meursault, or myself. On the surface, the three of us are extremely dissimilar, but we all experience relatively negative things that teach us more than we knew before. Marjane Satrapi is a real woman who grew up in Iran, Meursault is a character from North Africa, and I am a real teenage girl from a small seaside town. Nonetheless, when it comes to existentialism, the three of us stand as examples of the legitimacy of its philosophy.
Liberties outside of Iran are especially different to a person who has never known anything but a specific type of culture. For example, on her way back to her friend’s house from the airport in Austria, Satrapi thinks, “What a traitor! While people were dying in our country, she was talking to me about trivial things” (156/7). From this we are able to see how the regime brainwashed Satrapi into thinking a specific way, especially because of the veil. When always necessary to wear the veil in public, she must adapt to life without the veil in order to function in a society where one can be free.
The first chapter "The Veil" carries a great deal of weight. It is the chapter that sets the tone for the entire autobiography, it shows the difficulties for women in Iran in those years, and that's an issue that Satrapi highlights in the autobiography. Whitlock says about that matter that: Persepolis 1 begins with a chapter called "The Veil," and this garment is represented in a highly iconic (as opposed to realistic) cartoon drawing of the newly-veiled Marji and her girlfriends Golnaz, Mahshid, Narine, and Minna. For the Muslim girls, the first experiences of the Revolution were spatial segregation according to gender and faith, and this segregation included hijab. The maghnaeh (hooded head-scarf) that covers Marji and her friends frames
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.
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.
One way Satrapi challenges negative stereotypes about Iranians is through important characters who oppose the Islamic Regime because she shows individualism. In the chapter The Veil Marjane in the year 1980 shows she doesn’t believe in being forced to wear
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
The graphic novel, Persepolis that is written by Satrapi depicts the coming of age story of Marjane and her experiences during and after the Iranian war. Through Marjane’s experiences, the character frequently encounters the hardship and conflict of growing up. However, these hardships are major factors that shape Marjane as a character and establish the context of the novel. Within this novel, Satrapi uses graphic novel conventions and literary devices to convey the conflict of Marjane; with herself, with man (in the form of her teachers), and with the society that is revealed in Persepolis.
It was later called The Islamic Revolution” (Satrapi 3). The readers see right away that every students entered school was asked to wear veil due to the fact that “1980: The Year it became obligatory to wear the veil at school” (Satrapi 3). The veil symbolizes the restriction of social liberties for
Persepolis, written by Marjane Satrapi, is a memoir depicting the life of a young girl growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran during the late 1970’s. Before the Islamic Revolution the country of Iran was run by a westernized ruler called the Shah. After the Shah is overthrown the country’s new government places new religious rules making if obligatory for women, and sometimes men, to wear specific clothing in public. A key theme I picked up on in the book is the theme of rights, specifically women's rights. Marjane Satrapi writes the women and their roles in her book as strong willed and very active in politics.
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
‘Persepolis’ by Marjane Satrapi tells an autobiographical story of a chaotic childhood. The story gives an amusing but also a nostalgic overview, a young girl’s life whose life is challenged by the Iranian revolution of 1980s. Satrapi’s detailed narration combined with the format of a graphic novel, challenges reader’s pre-established perception of Iran and gender. The book review will evaluate the paperback through 4 key themes that appear throughout the text: the significance of female narration and what does the reader gain from hearing Marjane’s point of view; the second theme that will be discussed is the dominant theme of the woman and the nation; thirdly, the contrasting dichotomy of the past and the present, and finally presenting
Persepolis Reflective Statement How was your understanding of the cultural and contextual considerations of “Persepolis” developed through the interactive oral? My understanding and exploration of Persepolis, the tale of young Iranian girl was looked at through a feminist lense, therefore noticing the cultural differences and the role of women in Iran in contrast to that of my own. However, I also was interested by the role of religion in the book which was omnipresent.
