POSTED AT 11:43 AM
Marjane respects her uncle more than her father, because he was a prisoner and was tortured. Marjane is very deep and devoted to her causes, although she and her friends are very prone to being influenced negatively by all the events that go on. For example, when they played a game and the one who lost was had to be tortured. Marjane is only a child and only with the proper guidance of her parents is she able to stay a good person.
I am not fond of Persepolis as a character, I personally think that she is glorifying the prisoners of war like her uncle. For instance when she goes on and on about her dad loosing an arm and being tortured in prison. Its almost like she is looking for that heart ache that her friends are going through. She is also extremely blunt with her friends like when she say that being on a long trip is what they say when people are dead. Although i do give major points to Marjane Satrapi for creating a realistic character and showing the flaws in persepolis
I think it's interesting how much Marjane changes while growing up. She witnesses differeing things and sees the way other people live when she goes to Austria first to live with her parents friends, and then in a boarding school where she gets kicked out of. She is forced to learn how to live on her own now and grows up a lot at that time.
So after a couple hours looking for connections between Art Spiegelman & Marjane Satrapi i found this. it is a conversation between the two talking about the reasons for writing there books, Maus and Persepolis, the moderator is really annoying but there answers are fascinating. part two is the best i encourage all to lesson.
www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/919/prmID/1064
I like how if she is talking about a group of people, they all look the exact same. If you even look at the people in the background, they are all identical. The only people with any individual characteristics are ones she personally knows. It really brings the different things into focus and makes them with greater importance in most cases.
Going off what Kelsey said I really like the way Satrapi draws in general. In some ways it has the charm of something you would see in a Sunday paper yet it has very complex panels that pop up as well. I especially like all her conversations with God.
i agree with kelsey, i find her art to be extremely interesting, on p.40 and p.254 there are some pictures that tend to just repeat the same person or object in a pattern, it all seems to blend together and nothing stands out. All seem to be things that she has not seen her self but has imagined. its like she cant find anything unique about the people they are all the same. the patterns really make the pictures stand out when you are reading the book
seeing as we are all talking about the art in the book. I think that you should all pay attention to the art that is portrayed on the walls in her room as well as in her living room. They are replicas of some very famous pieces of art, the question is why doe she do this as an artist? Look at the Birds too.
i don't know about any one else but when art is brought up i can't help but to think about the art work in the Metamorphosis and how those pictures meant something. maybe the same thing is going on here what do you guys think? why those pictures?
so tonight i pulled out the mouse book to compare the type of art that they put in their comic. her art is extremely simplistic.Maus has so many little details to analyze, and the shading is interesting. in Maus. in almost all of her sides there is no background its more about the people and what they are saying, and Spiegelman has inserted details in the background in his work that are important and symbolic.
finished, worth the read, the way that it ends is not so good I think, yet the picture of her leaving at the very end is a powerful one. She looks so happy in retrospect after everything that has happened to her its a nice twist.
Going back to the middle pages, it seems that this book is written to deal with just about every teenage major issue that a kid would face, from suicide to fitting in, to homosexuality. its all in there, there was one moment that caught my eye, however and its the idea that PUNK could become big in Iran. To think about Marjane as a punk is just hard to comprehend. slightly funny as well, difinatly a dark humor to this book too.
i sorta agree with Kathryn. Marjane seems to be wanting to fit in with her friends, feels that there is glory in having a martyr to the cause in her family. this same feeling is what the ismlamic government relies on during the iraq iran war to keep support up. marjane is proud to have a martyr in the family, and the government relies on that sense of pride to feed its current war.
It's interesting to me that at the end of Persopolis Marjane returns to her home country. To see how she viewed Iran in the beginning of the book as a child to how she viewed it as a adult with all of the other experiences which she had during her travels, is a cool way to see how she grew up. The change in her opinions is evident too, and in the scenes when she is at school are proof of that.
I find it sad that the people in Iraq during this time are manipulating young boys that fighting is fun and that heaven is miraculous only to ge them to fight. The people of the war may not really think this but they are simply trying to get the young children to fight. They give them keys that "get them into heaven. The young boys are now believing in this so they want to fight but really they leaders are causing them to believe in this for the benefit of the war.
Marjanes sojourn to europe andher subsequent return are extremely interesting. namely, while there and immediately upon return she casts herself as a martyr as a victim. to me, in light of what was happening in her home country this seems to be more just whiny little girl status than anything else. she becomes so involved with her own semi minor problems (yes shes a foriegner without love) that she ignores her people who are in far worse circumstances than hers. in the last 3 months, being homeless, i can see some legitimate suffering, but up until that point she just seems to be moaning about a situation that in reality is not nearly as bad as it could be. coming home she initially even tries to compare that suffering to her people's which sorta annoyed me.
I agree with Bennett, I think that when Marjane has to live her life as a homeless foreinger this is a critical point in her life in which she realizes that there are bigger things going on than her own problems. It's also interesting to me how she decides not to tell her family anyhting about her time in Austria when she returns to Iran, for fear that her parents and family will be ashamed of her for caring about such unimportant things.
I agree with bennett, there are people around her who are suffering more than she is, and she is just disregarding any of it. She is only about the "poor me" aspect, when in reality up this this point she has been pretty lucky and has a good life. It really annoyed me too!
Family in this book is important because throughout the beginning of the book she has her family as a support system. However when she moves away to boarding school she only has her friends. She begins to change and by the end she realizes that she needs her family and is broken down because she doesn't have anyone to lean on.
I really like the economy of words that Satrapi uses to drive her point resoundingly home. Her storytelling speaks for itself, and it seems way more honest this way. And like Katherine said, she is kinda nonchalant about describing the terrible things that happened to her and the people around her as a kid, but I think this is because she is writing it as a adult and that she has seen so much pain and misery that it doesn't surprise her anymore.
Sorry about that.
I agree with Kelsey and Bennett becauase i find it funny that at the beginning of the book Satrapi seems to have a lot more sympathy for the people around her. But she also feels sorry for herself when again, other people have it worse. Later on, her life does get harder becuase she has to learn to deal with things on her own but really she is lucky to be getting out of her hometown and living a different life. She breaks down and that is a way to make everyone feel sorry for her and she doesn't look at the lives of the other people at this point
I am seeing a theme. Marjane is frequently in a state of insecurity and uncertainty. I think that she accurately portrays "human nature" as we know it. Many people are selfish and don't even know it.
I agree with Gina that Marjane is now seeing Iran through different eyes because she is an adult. All the events she went through were hard but they shaped her and helped her realize more evident things about life. She is now old enough to really understand the things going on in Iraq as an adult rather than as a child. I liked this book. I think that the art and pictures Satrapi used were interesting and helped the readers understand Marjane's ways of thinking.
I love the chapter "the cigarette" because I like how while she is walking down the steps to the basement, or her 'sanctuary', she is recalling what actually happened when the army took Khorramshahr. Visually, the steps are very wide and very long and i think that enhances the hopelessness that she feels as she is walking to her sanctuary. I love how sometimes Marjane retrospectively tells things, the action is technically happening while the story is going on but she is speaking about it retrospectively. I think that works really well it adds a sort of interesting quality when she is a child and doing this, because it is a child with such an adult tone.
Also in that scene I love it when she walks down into the scene with the fighting and then comes out at the over end to go through the door. The next panel has no writing and she is laying down. The art and panelling here is used really well, it shows a very intense scene and then by walking through the door she also enters her emotional sanctuary. I also love how she is still telling the story while she is smoking the cigarette and how she can look back on her life and pinpoint the moment when she was no longer a child.
I like the scene when she walks out alone and gets spotted by the Guardians of the Revolution and she makes up all the excuses. I thought that she was very clever. I thought it was funny when she said that Michael Jackson was actually malcolm X, but beneath that she said "back then, michael Jackson was still black" that cracked me up.
Then I love the four panels on pg 134 in which her face is slowly melting with her tears, I thought that was a pretty accurate and clever and funny representation of what happens when you slowly break down when someone is interrogating you. And then I thought it was funny when she came home with her eyes swollen, that was a really great representation and then dancing with her eyes swollen. It was funny, but also sad in a way because she said "to each his own way of calming down", and it is unfortunate that she had that experience that she has to calm down after wearing a michael jackson pin and being called a "whore" for not wearing the veil properly.
i completely understand the severity of the war that is going on while Marjane is a child/young teen but for some reason while I was reading the early chapters I read it as if Marjane didn't take it very seriously or sort of passed it off as not as dangerous as it really is. For example when she leaves the house in her nikes and denim jacket with a michael jackson pin she almost gets in serious trouble but the style of writing makes it very casual and not anxious at all. I also agree completely with Caitie though as a reason for this, it just seems like it should be a point of the author to try and freak out the reader with the fear of Marjane being captured or tortured.
i agree with niquel a lot and cna see where you are coming from niquel. iwas actually going to write something about that but i guess i got beat to it.
On page 142 I like the last three panels and the story of Neda and her family. The lack of writing on the second to last panel is really effective as well as the panel with just the black. These were very moving panels and a good example of Satrapi's use of black.
after finishing the book i think this is really one of my favorite books we read all year. i like how accurate the book really is of teenage life styles and the challengers we go threw. i'm glad i had to read this book in high school because like i said i can relate to it a lot better than i probably could years from now. right?
on pages 82-83 of Persepolis 2 (I have it in two books, so I dunno what pages it is on in the complete persepolis), when she has just broken up with Markus and she is going back through the relationship and going through the bad parts and getting more and more mad until she finally says that she is going more crazy and i like how she describes how she wanted him to be all these figures in her life. But everyone always goes through every thing that before you overlooked, but after the relationship ends you focus on, and that really stuck out to me.
I have a few comments. I completely agree that Marjane is proud to have a martyr in the family, because to her martyrdom symbolizes the absolute greatest sacrifice someone can make while fighting for a cause, and in this case the cause that she was taught from a very young age was the correct one. One scene I found very interesting was the one where Marjane was recounting the story her uncle told her about his time in prison, After she finishes, the kids around her are incredulous, saying that the story is 'too much'. I think this is very interesting because kids tend to believe many far-fetched stories, yet they refuse to believe the stories about Marjane's uncle. This illustrates just how brutal and terrifying life in prison as a political prisoner must have been at that time..
in response to kyle. at the same time Marjane is so desperate to fit in with the other kids who have martyrs or prisoners in their families that, originally, she lies about her father being a prisoner. as i said earlier having a martyr is a really kinda honorable, so she makes up the stories and so the kids say 'too much' when she tells the far fetched stories. then, when she finally does have a martyr in the family who has been through some outrageous things, they simply dont believe her. kyles final point still stands, even coming from a liar, the true story seems too far fetched for the kids. and the secrecy surrounding prison and what went on there was probably far to much for the normal citizens of the country to fully understand or believe
The end sort of left me dissatisfied, I don't know something about it wasn't enough closure for the hardships of what Marjane went through. Maybe it is because as an adult writing this novel she has accepted what she went through and moved on but there should've been something more joyous and more milestone-like if that makes sense. I also just really love the few pages 307-309 when there is no dialogue at all and Marjane is at the party that gets busted and their friend dies. To me that just completely encapsulates the fear of their situation because they never really took it seriously until then. I really love the way she can portray these feelings with her pictures and I liked the book! A lot!
The part where Marjane tells the Guardians that the man on the steps said something indecent (285) to her is absolutly wrong. I can't belive that she would sacrifice someone else's wellbeing for her own. It seems like a really cowardly act to me; especially considering that she is usssualy brave enough to stand up for herself in other dangerous situations (like with the people she lives with in Austrai). She also never really seems to show any regret for her actions, and even when her grandmother draws her attenton to the injustice of the act. It makes me think she is extremely selfish.
I can't belive that Reza critisizes Marjane for not "being made uo enough" (285), especially as she could be and almost was arrested for it. It seems ridiculous to me that she would continue to be with a man that was not happy with her becsue she did not work hard enough to alter her natural beauty, even at the cost of her safety. Marjane's mom read her feminist literature and she seemed to be brought up in an environment where her parents expected her to stand up for herself, especially as a woman. It was surprising to me that she would later marry this man.
So much of this reminds me of some of the things that Primo Levi describes in his book about Auschwitz. There seem to be so many parallels to the Holocaust especially on 125 with the escape of the fake passport maker and the communist that he was hiding. It seems to share some of the same gruesome cruelty; which makes me wonder why this isn't spoken about more. I feel so ignorant about such a monumental conflict.
Marjane's parents are pretty phenomenal in this book and retain thier sense of commitment to justice even in the midst of extreme reprisal from the government. Throughout the book I kept thinking how lucky Marjane was to have such understanding and supportive parents that cared so much about her. They sacrifice so much for her and it's really inspiring to see.
I think it is also really interesting how dark her images are. She uses so much black and there are really no shades of gray. This is perhaps an allusion to the Iranian Government which seems to function only in black and white, oppressing all shades of gray. It might also be due to Satrapi's personality. She seems like someone with a vibrant character that is loud and very alive. Perhaps the black and white without gray demonstrates the starkness of Satrapi herself. It was interesting anyway.
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