ipl-logo

The Complete Persepolis Essay

1005 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How does marji change throughout persepolis

In The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi recounts her life growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution. Through her personal experiences and observations, Satrapi conveys how the revolution had a profound impact on her perception of family and friends. Indeed, during this period, Satrapi felt fearful and confused; as a result, she desired stability and sought meaningful connections. Ultimately, the book’s portrayal of someone experiencing these emotions helped explain what is like to live through political upheaval and how it tests one’s relationships with loved ones.
In The Complete Persepolis, Satrapi emphasizes how she feels about her family and describes their shared experiences. At the beginning of the book, Marjane is a young …show more content…

Initially, Marjane loves Anoosh. He is a source of comfort and support who helps Marjane make sense of the world around her. However, as the revolution progresses, Anoosh is arrested and executed — leaving Marjane confused and grieving. This relationship helps the reader envision how the Iranian Revolution’s political upheaval could destroy families and leave people feeling isolated. In The Complete Persepolis, its simple illustrations assist in conveying the emotions its characters experience. After her uncle’s death, Marjane no longer feels like a child, but she also does not feel like an adult either. Living in a restrictive society, Satrapi struggles to process her emotions. To Satrapi’s credit, it is easy for readers who have also experienced trauma in their lives to identify with Marjane. "I realized that I was living in a world where everything was changing, and where nothing was predictable." This quote reflects how the Revolution impacted Marjane's life — namely, by shattering any sense of stability or predictability. Moreover, Marjane demonstrates that stressful circumstances can improve one’s problem-solving skills.
In addition to her feelings of fear and loss, Marjane also craves stability and connection. Throughout the book, she struggles to find a sense of belonging. For examples, she moves from Iran to Austria and back again. At the same time, her relationships with her family and friends are increasingly uncertain. This desire for stability and connection is perhaps best exemplified by Marjane's relationship with her grandmother. Marjane’s grandmother provides a sense of continuity and comfort even as the world around her is in flux. "My grandmother had always been a source of comfort and

Show More
Related
1216 Words | 5 Pages

Family, government, and religion shaped the development of Marji’s rebellious nature and her ability to question life by presenting unique obstacles

Read More
872 Words | 4 Pages

In the graphic novel, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, the story follows Marji, a ten-year-old girl who grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1980. Throughout the book, we see Marji grow and learn about life and herself during the time of war and terror. The story follows her journey through many different uprisings and historically altering events in Iran. This leads us to wonder if a specific event or experience was a tipping point in her childhood and if it had a bigger impact than expected. Throughout the book, the Islamic Revolution had the biggest impact on her life and it altered her morals and values.

Read More
570 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More
962 Words | 4 Pages

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.

Read More
1445 Words | 6 Pages

Religion has been the cause of different outbreaks such as ‘The Crusades’ and several terrorist attacks which date not very far away from today and more relevant to this topic the Iranian Revolution, but how can this “collection of beliefs” be the reason for someone to change their way of thinking, especially in such a religious country like Iran. The story of Persepolis, written by Marjane Satrapi tells us the story of her life in Iran before and after the revolution showing us the different ‘personalities’ she goes through, from innocent girl to a disaffected teenager. In this story Satrapi exploits different themes such as the heterogeneity in regions with Iran and the rest of the world, warfare and politics but one that stands out and is presented through the whole book is religion. Religion is portrayed as an excuse to start a conflict and it shows the personal development of characters, in this case the protagonist Marji.

Read More
1614 Words | 7 Pages

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.

Read More
1402 Words | 6 Pages

Marjane states, “With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye. Now I was a grown-up” (Satrapi 117). Marjane, just like the girl in this image, has shown her loss of innocence through her perspective. She can no longer be sheltered from her parents or be ignorant in relation to the world around her. The theme of gender roles has heavily impacted Marjane 's perspective in regard to the events occuring in Iran.

Read More
957 Words | 4 Pages

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.

Read More
1203 Words | 5 Pages

She knew that it wasn’t all perfect and good but she also knew that it was not a cesspool of despair and darkness that some people make it out to be. So, she wrote the novel in a very smart way, she uses literary devices to show and tell a fantastic story but at the same time uses it as a way to talk about the problems and good things about Iran in the 1970s. This allows Persepolis to live longer and be discussed much longer if she simply didn’t use metaphors. It is also a way to show and teach people about a very heated subject and show them not everything is totally black and white in this world and that sometimes the monsters are actually men but at the very same time people can be great, people can work together to further a cause, people can care and at the end of the day people in Iran are exactly that, people and Marjane Satrapi simply wanted to show that in her novel and she succeeded

Read More
976 Words | 4 Pages

However, Marjane 's expression is sad while she says this and shows she is not alright. This reveals that Marjane is in denial and how contradictory her words to her emotions are. Furthermore, the next page displays

Read More
1088 Words | 5 Pages

With all things considered, the personal nature of the story is expertly expressed through Marjane’s loss of innocence, her beliefs and opinions on her religion, and her experiences with gender

Read More
1436 Words | 6 Pages

The graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is an animated ‘identity crisis’ showing how she has trouble reconciling the Eastern and Western values that she has been influenced by. By ‘identity crisis’ I mean Marjane is uncertain about who she is and where she belongs to. The Eastern values would include hierarchy, restraint, collectivism and deference, whereas the Western values would include equality, freedom of expression, individualism and self-assertion. A graphic novel can be defined as a book containing a long story told mostly in pictures but with some writing. I intend to investigate why Satrapi has chosen to use the graphic novel instead of using other styles to present Marjane attempts to reconcile the different values and find

Read More
1228 Words | 5 Pages

Have you ever read a graphic novel with a variety of worldwide problems? From: racial issues, economic issues, women’s rights, political repression, social issues etcetera. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is the authors memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Marjane Satrapi tells her story through black and white comic strips of her life in Tehran from her childhood ages six to fourteen. Persepolis portrays a memorable portrait of daily life in Iran, as well the perplexing contradictions between home life and public life.

Read More
1183 Words | 5 Pages

When Marjane is a child, she was very obedient. She followed the rules of Islam and the rules that her parents had established. As Marjane grows older, she begins to lose her innocence. She grows into this girl who is rotten. She does not obey Islam, she begins to not obey her parents, and she causes trouble in her school.

Read More
1133 Words | 5 Pages

Throughout Satrapi's childhood, she experienced a wider array of adult topics than most children could ever expect to encounter. It is all but impossible to find examples of positive influences from Satrapi’s war torn childhood. However, after digging through all the negative examples presented, there remain a few shining gems that were responsible for making Satrapi who she is today. Marjane Satrapi is truly one of the most talented authors of our time. With her book Persepolis, Satrapi demonstrates this talent by juxtaposing positive and negative topics, sometimes even on the same page or within the same panel.

Read More

More about The Complete Persepolis Essay

Related Topics

Open Document