Satrapi’s extraordinary circumstances and unusual family create a plethora of these contrasts, a situation that gives depth and pathos to the narrative and plays a large part in its readability and appeal. There are multiple paradoxical identities: Satrapi is Iranian but also French, Eastern but also Western, upper class and highly educated with Marxist ideals, an ordinary adolescent and a revolutionary, a modern Western girl (in perspective and mindset) and patriotic liberal Iranian. Here’s an abridged version (spoilers included, this is from a critical analysis):Ĭonflicting identities and the contrasts between different aspects of Marji’s personality are themes that underlie all the events in Persepolis. I felt it deserved a wider audience (though I must warn that it’s an in-depth critical analysis and so might not be interesting if you haven’t read the book), so – Du Bois’s On Double Consciousness and Gilbert and Gubar’s The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship to examine Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of A Childhood and The Story of a Return‘). I then wrote what I consider the best paper of my undergraduate years on it (‘Using W.E.B. I loved this book so much that I missed a class reading it in college. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.’ ‘ Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family of her homecoming–both sweet and terrible and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. ‘The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-granddaughter of Iran’s last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.’

Inspired by the cover art for Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis marjane