Graphic narratives have, over time, become increasingly more respected in today’s society and have made for many interesting conversations in the scholarly world. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic narrative or graphic autobiography, Persepolis, is a story of an Iranian woman, Satrapi, recounting the events of her past and working through the traumatic experiences that happened to her and to the people of Iran during the Iranian revolution. Satrapi writes this book primarily from the perspective of herself as a child, though, throughout the book there is overlap between narratives of herself as an adult and herself as a child. This overlap appears particularly in the panels that depict torture scenes. This overlap exists, I believe, to signify the parts of her memory and imagination that still cannot be completely captured or processed because of the horrific violence that would have to be accepted, indicating the significance of such violation and the struggle of a human being to accept it.

Hillary Chute, “a renowned expert on graphic narratives and comics”, does significant work in analyzing many parts of Persepolis and manages to identify three “different Satrapis” encountered in the work  (Hillary). She identifies the personas of Satrapi, the “author”, Marjane, “the narrator [of] the text”, and Marji, as “the child protagonist” (Chute, 97). Chute also draws attention to a panel on page 52 of Satrapi’s graphic autobiography that depicts a man who was drawn and quartered as a form of torture and punishment (Satrapi, 52). Chute begins her analysis by drawing attention to the size and simplicity of the childlike depiction and the power it gives to the drawing. However, she does not mention the parts which seem to contradict the child perception. The drawing is indeed of a man quartered, but instead of only Marji’s perception, there are also elements of Marjane’s interpretation of this dead man. On one hand, Marji’s perspective can be seen with the clean cuts and the speedo covering the man’s privates; on the other there are the sunken cheeks and the defined ribs and clavicle showing signs of death or starvation as seen by Marjane. This panel is Satrapi trying to fill in the imagination of her younger self’s, Marji’s, imagination. This is critical as it shows the blending of two different imaginations of what a man quartered would look like and how even those together don’t come close to reality. This is because the reality is too harsh to be shown in its fullness – too real to be real. As Chute puts it, “no perspective, however informed, can fully represent trauma”; this point being so important she repeats, “it can not be adequately expressed by words or by pictures” (Chute, 102). The harshness and reality of violence is something that is extremely hard to process or conceive which is shown through the inability of the panel to capture this horrific moment.

The fact that the blend of the imaginations of Satrapi and Marji don’t offer anything close to what this scene would look like is an important moment in the graphic autobiography which signals the unimaginable horror of death and torture by the “inadequacy” of the panels to capture it. To be able to witness human struggles and the human condition through the work of graphic autobiographies is remarkable and should be recognized as such.

Works cited

Chute, Hillary. Women’s Studies Quarterly: The Textures of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s

Persepolis. 36 Vol. Feminist Press, 03/22/2008. Web. 12 Jan. 2017.

“Hillary Chute.” Department of English. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2017.

<https://www.northeastern.edu/cssh/english/spotlight/hillary-chute/>.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY: Pantheon , 2003. Print.