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Satrapi's Persepolis

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Satrapi’s Persepolis is her autobiography in the form of a graphic novel set in Iran in the 1980’s. The story is about the author, Marjane Satrapi, in her pre-teen years. The book starts during the Islamic Revolution. The revolution is successful and the shah is thrown out of power and is replaced by the Islamic Regime. The Islamic Regime forces women to cover up and wear veils. Later in the story, Iran and Iraq start a war against each other causing non-stop violence, protests, and bombing. One of the most prominent panels in the book is the final scene in the story. In the final panel, Marjane is about to leave to Austria, to get away from the violence, but before she leaves she has to see her parents one last time. She turns around and immediately …show more content…

Marjane frantically pounds her hands on the glass, and she thinks… “It would have been better to just go” (153). The panel fits into the story because Marjane and her families contradictory beliefs against the Islamic regime get Marjane into constant trouble throughout the book. Her beliefs get her expelled from school, thus her parents decide to send her to Austria. Then, the last scene creates drama, sadness and mystery before she goes to Austria. Satrapi successfully uses the additive style where words add onto the importance of the picture to capture the intensity, sorrow, and drama of the ultimate scene in her very own autobiography, Persepolis.
In the final scene of Persepolis, pictures carry greater power than words in the panel since the pictures show the action going on, while the words enhance the drama in the scene because the words act as an afterthought for the picture. Satrapi draws the final scene from a “camera angle” that shows the …show more content…

Satrapi illustrates the scene to show her own, her mother, and her father's expression. The picture is very dramatic because Marjane’s last memory of her parents is her mother's lifeless body in her crying father´s hands. Additionally, the words show that Marjane regrets turning around to see her parents, and that is going to be her last memory of her parents. The words give the reader a gut punch because the words help the reader understand how she see’s the scene. Thus, this is my favorite panel because I felt the gut punch when I read the end. I found the final panel to be very meaningful because it shows how the war can split up families which I never understood. I immediately thought of how I would feel in her situation. I really felt that I had to explore the deeper meaning of the final panel because the final scene opened my eyes to the struggle to survive in Iran during the war, and the hardships Satrapi

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