The Outcome of Satrapis Speech

The Outcome of Satrapi’s Speech There are about 96,803-105,553 civilians as of June 2010 that have died from violence during the Iraq war. Marjane Satrapi sympathizes with these people and their families. She is against the war and tries to spread the word to her readers. In 2005 Satrapi was invited to speak at West Point, a military base that was required to read her novel Persepolis. She describes what she thought the trip would be like before and after it occurred in a comic strip called My Speech at West Point. Satrapi perceptibly addresses the issues of war, death, and insularity in her essay with humor, and is affected greatly by the outcome of her trip. Although Satrapi is there to talk about Persepolis, she takes this opportunity to share her views on the war in Iraq. In the beginning of the essay she shows that she is intimidated by the military, mostly because they are helping the cause that she is fighting against, which is the war. At one point in the essay she states “democracy is not a present you give to people by bombing them.”(p.231, Satrapi). This shows that she is against the way the United States deals with other countries using their military tactics. She uses humor to show that the major and cadets will hang her, but this also demonstrates us her view on how they are violent and will kill people who disagree with them. Like Iraqis that may be fighting for the safety of their families and homes. In the end of the comic she despondently reads a newspaper that says “seven American soldiers and ten Iraqis died today in Baghdad.”(p.232, Satrapi). Despite the fact that she says she does not know much about anything, she knows that the deaths in Iraq are wrong and should be stopped. The way she structures the comic is by showing what she expected the speech to go like and the way it actually went. She anticipates it to be very uncomfortable and intimidating. The military obviously has a different view of the war than she does, thus she believes