Harroop's Persepolis: Week 4

Something to think about:

Persepolis has many statements which many people whether in Iran or Canada can relate to and people of any age. She is someone who has been through a lot and has the wisdom to show people the bigger life changing questions. In class when we talk about questions like "where does our identity come?", they really make me think and I honestly don't even know. Most of are thinking is a lot like our parents some of it from our friends and some from the media. We become the person the world wants us to and try our best to become like the environment we are surrounded by. But Marjane is not like that she can not change the fact that she is Iranian who thinks like a European, and why should she change herself to become one if that is who she is. This really made me think because so many people hide themselves to become someone else and I know I do that so how do we know who we really are, are we all just the same. If we like the same type of story then maybe we are not different from anyone else. So throught out the process of reading persepolis I thought of these ideas.

Literary Features:

• This may be stretching it a bit to far but I think that the Marjanes grandmother and uncle anoosh are foils for each other because they both are mentioned but Marjane as being dead by the end of the book and on the page 341 she mentions that her grandmother died two years later. But she could have left that and made a happy ending when Marjane leaves for Austria once again. On page 341 the last line she says is "freedom had a a price", and for her to get her freedom she could not be with her grandmother before she past away and when uncle anoosh died in order for him to gain freedom he had to die as well and Marjane could not be there with him when he died. They both had similar characteristics like they both loved Marjane, they both loved rebelling and both wanted freedom. So this may not be true and maybe its just something that I am stretching to far but it seems to me that they both are very similar.
  

Snippets:

• On page 286 I was really surprised with Marjane's behavior when she blames an innocent man of harrasment which is something which the officers in Iran take very seriously and all of a sudden Marjane to the reader is no longer a hero who stands up for herself but becomes a coward by trying to hide herself from being arrested. This is something which is completely devastating for the reader to see especially because most comic strips the reader sees themselves looking at the protagonist and wishing they had there courage but here we see Marjane blaming a poor man for no reason at all.
• On page 317 we see Marjane being prisoned in her new home and in her dialogue shes says "I was already sorry! I had suddenly become a married woman, I had conformed to society while I had always wanted to remail in the margins", so she became exactly what she did not want and that was become exactly what her society wanted her to and now she was trapped with someone forever but she is someone who wants freedom so her being prisoned juxaposoes with her personality because she would never be trapped in anything and would strive to be free.