Comparing The White Tiger And Persepolis

One idea that can be compared between the novels The White Tiger and Persepolis is education. The role that education plays in both novels shows a lot about the characters and societies of the time they take place. To begin, in The White Tiger, Balram isn’t given the opportunity to gain an education due to the fact that he needs to begin working to help out his cousin. Balram gains intelligence by learning how to make his way through life while not having the book-smarts that society requires one must have to be considered intelligent. Balram manages to find a way to obtain a license, and slowly moves his way up in the cab industry going from a small car to a luxury one. This goes to show that book-smarts are not the only important type of
In this novel, the main character, Marji is a ten year old girl who attends school and is very interested in everything that is going on around her, from wanting a better understanding of her own religion to understanding the workings of her Country. These are things Marji is very interested, but the only issue is that the education she is receiving from school contains a lot of propaganda. Back then and to this day, schools in Iran feed children propaganda to make them believe what they want them to, and when Marji finds this out she desperately wants to know the truth about everything. Although this isn’t the point, this goes to show that Marji was very interested in obtaining an education while Balram in the The White Tiger was not. This leads into the idea of different classes in the novels impacting the main characters in different
She notices that most of the people who were of the higher class in Iran following the revolution gained power and were given a lot of money. When noticing this, Marji wishes for everything to be fair for all classes but doesn’t understand when her father tells her that in Iran all people must stay within their own social class. Marji knows that these people from different classes won’t have the same opportunities as her, which is the opposite of what happens to Balram in The White Tiger. The separation of classes actually winds up making both characters more mentally mature and better able to face the regular world when theyre thrown out into it, although in very different