In the past week, our Arts Studies class studied author Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a memoir of the author’s return to Sri Lanka to discover the identity of his father and in part himself. Unlike traditional memoirs however, Running in the Family breaks many of the norms of the genre by violating the presupposition of truth with interjections of impossibilities and fantastical descriptions of real events. In similarity, Persepolis, a graphic memoir by author Marjane Satrapi, also reaches out of the boundaries of its genre. Persepolis, despite being a graphic novel, demonstrates a stylized but realistic view of historically important events. The literary use of identity is a major theme in both of these publications, but the exact way in which each work expresses this theme varies in many ways, with each way providing us with further knowledge and insight into how identity is formed.
Both Persepolis and Running in the Family are about real events, and therefore the identities of characters share some common roles and purposes: as both books are intended to be memoirs that use their personal stories to expand upon the baseline memoir, the identities of the characters Marji and Michael Ondaatje have some similarities. Both Marji and Michael are presented as observers. Marji witnesses the “Cultural Revolution” (Satrapi, 8), the “demonstrations for and against the veil” (9), but as a child, Satrapi didn’t even “know what to think about the veil” (10). In a similar vein, the goal that Michael expresses in Running, the reason for his return to Sri Lanka, is to “trace the maze of relationships in [his] ancestry” (Ondaatje, 7). Throughout Running, Michael rarely interacts with any of the characters directly, and instead has implied conversations and meetings. In this way, the identities of the main characters are very similar; they are presented as observers.
However, there are some differences between the identities of Marji and Michael. Marji’s identity is tied very strongly with her home of Iran and its politics, but Michael’s identity, while still strongly associated with his mother country of Sri Lanka, is much more divorced from the political aspects of the modern nation itself. In the very introduction to Persepolis, Satrapi states that “[Iran] has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth” (Satrapi). Ondaatje goes the opposite direction in Running, sparking English scholar Matthew Bolton’s assertion that “readers who evaluate the book in terms of Ondaatje’s flesh-and-blood ethnic and political identity ignore the complex process of identity formation occurring in the text itself” (Bolton, 222). Where the characters’ identities in Persepolis are heavily involved with expressing a political opinion, Running in the Family is less concerned with politics and more with “creat[ing] a porous and fluctuating identity using a variety of narrative techniques” (Bolton, 226).
Persepolis and Running in the Family are very different works, from the characterization to the themes to the very medium through which they are expressed, and this difference is reflected in the way the two author’s have formulated the identities of their main characters. Despite the differences, however, Marji and Michael Ondaatje do have their similarities, and these too are reflected in their identities as both fictional and non-fictional characters.