Persipolis: Essays By Marjane Satrapi

PRESCRIBED LITERATURE IN
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ENGLISH LITERATURE A1
NAME: SAI SIDDHARDHA K
CANDIDATE SESSION NUMBER: 003528-0011
EXAMINATION SESSION: MAY 2016
NAME OF THE INSTRUCTOR: MRS. BINDU C.G.
TITLE: WAR AND LOSS OF INNOCENCE
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REFLECTIVE STATEMENT
How was your understanding of cultural and contextual considerations of the work developed through the interactive oral?
In our second interactive oral, we discussed about the graphical novel Persipolis written by Marjane Satrapi.

War often has the tendency to scar a person’s life. It makes people live through some very terrible experiences. War has left nations crippled, turned cities into rubble and humans dead. People fight over a territory, for politics or simply
Her parents are liberal unlike the majority of the country who believed in the social and political ideas of the western countries. Her parents loved her and wanted to provide the best education and hoped to provide her will all the privileges. Her relationship with her parents was very tender. She knows a lot of history of the world because of the books her parents gave to her to study as well as her favourite book which is a comic book called Dialectic Materialism. For Marjane this is a very interesting book as it talks about Karl Marx and Descartes argue about the validity of material world. Often with her friends Marjane plays the role of famous revolutionary figures such Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Trotsky and various other famous revolutionaries. Marjane’s parents were actively present in the Islamic revolution. Marjane grew up in a world she did not quite well understand as a child yet she was ready to make strong political statements. Her father was a photographer, photographing the political unrest in Iran, which is very risky job. He was against the Shah. He found it absurd when Marjane says "I love the king. He was chosen by God. … That's what it says on the first page of our schoolbook." (3.6, 3.10). This quotes states that young Marjane was innocent and was ready to believe in anything she read or heard about. He later explains why the Shah was a mean man and never stood on his word. "Since the dawn of time, dynasties have
However as the revolution progresses Persepolis also deals with the loss of innocence of young Marjane as she lives through the war and is also a metaphorical aspect in the book. Marjane tries to make sense of the revolution from the beginning, however being a 10-year old, understanding the cruel world around her is difficult. In the seventh chapter when Marjane listens to her parents’ friend Moshen telling about the cruel punishments faced by him in a prison with an iron, Marji said to herself “I never imagined that you could use such appliances for torture” (7.30). After listening to a part of this story, the happy-go-lucky nature of Marjane disappears, she has lost a part of her innocence by knowing about the cruel horrors in the world. God who had accompanied Marjane through the early days of war disappeared from her life as she had abandoned her faith in God after Uncle Anoosh’s death. This symbolises the slow degradation of her innocence. Due to the constant oppression and violence around Marjane, it had an impact on her social development. As she approaches adolescence, Marji turns rebellious “After the death of Neda Baba-Levy, my life took a new turn. In 1984 I was fourteen and a rebel. Nothing scared me more.” (p. 145). By the age of thirteen, when Marjane smokes her first cigarette she says “With this First cigarette, I kissed my childhood goodbye.” It was not just smoking her cigarette at a