Persepolis

Satrapi’s story is unique and stands out from anything we’ve read so far namely for the way she utilizes parallel narratives throughout the book. The story of her beloved homeland’s revolution and her own growth in understanding parallel each other in a way that highlights the sort of idealism of both. One of the reasons this side-by-side mode of storytelling was so interesting was because it placed us as readers in one particular perspective. As illustrated by the numerous demonstration scenes and police riots, the Islamic Revolution was (obviously) anything but simple and all the more important to realize that there not only was a lot at stake on a national level but for the millions of individuals involved. The inner workings and motivations of any revolution in history have been complicated and difficult to pin point one single cause or incentive. So the reader from the beginning is placed into this complicated historical moment, but from the idealistic and one-sided perspective of a little girl governed by her straightforward ideas about how the world should work. In the beginning scenes young Satrapi does a lot of holding up her finger in a very authoritative and knowing manner. Pg. 17 shows a particularly good instance of her know-it-all behavior: she’s sitting on her parents’ bed, in her pajamas with little hearts on them, but says “For a revolution to succeed, the entire population must support it.” She is really taking what she sees her parents believing in to an extreme, with the added effect of believing whole-heartedly that she is special (she is destined to be prophet and the world will be governed how she sees fit). As the only child of relatively well-off parents, her sense of specialness is fostered and allows her to, at least in the first parts, believe in the simplicity she imagines. It is through this idealistic perspective that we are introduced to the Revolution, inevitably placing the two on a parallel path. The narrative of the Revolution feels the effects of young Satrapis’s narrow understanding. There are instances where it appears that the master narrator wants to show the contained nature of her child self’s vision of the political events taking place. Very early in the story on pg. 5 the top panel shows a demonstration between women, half veiled and the other half unveiled. They are either shouting “veil” or “freedom.” This scene makes it appear that the most important feature of the Revolution was the veil, and the conflict could ultimately be boiled down to whether or not a woman wanted to wear it. Obviously that was not the case, but that sort of image illustrates the simplicity she places on events and in doing so strengthens the connection between her story and that of the Revolution. Again on pg. 28 we see how persistent she is to gather information that supports the narrative she imagines- all she wants to hear are stories about her princely grandfather, while her grandmother attempts to show her the facts. Seeing events through her eyes allows us to also witness where narrative of the nation, no longer able to be contained in her idealism, breaks free. Pg. 71 is just one large panel, entirely filled with black space (literally, space) that indicates her being sort of swallowed up by something much bigger than her and out of her “bearings.” This is also the point in the story where the new regime begins to be the enemy of her family’s causes instead of the Shah. The next chapter, “The Trip,” Satrapi is older and the problems of the country have changed along with her. In answer to the original prompt on the blog, what is really unique about Satrapi’s use of parallelism is the way we get absorbed in the two stories and sort of forget that one could be told without the other.