As I read the first few pages of The Complete Persepolis I felt alienated from the protagonist. I couldn’t relate to her conversations with God nor her desire to be a prophet. The first 15 pages I struggled to empathize with her pious yearnings and her saccharine, unquestioned devotion to religion. I also felt the artwork distanced me from any real connection to the characters. Afterall, when the characters are difficult to tell apart due to the complete lack of human detail (even the expression lines that appeared in American Born Chineselended some emotion and humanity to the cartoonish characters) it’s hard to react to the storyline. After finishing half of the book, I realized that the artwork served as a foil to the serious and provocative content within the book’s pages. When I reached page 33 I began to understand Marjane and remembered a time when I was a child and when good and bad seemed so obvious. Her childish sense of injustice and rage was similar to my own reaction as I read the story of her maid’s cruel rejection. Marjane has a deep sense of what the world should be versus her reality. Reading further, I recalled times in my own childhood when my conscience was easily (too easily) swayed by my parents or peers. Marjane wants to nail Ramin to a tree because his father admitted to killing people. She quickly recants, but only because her mother admonishes her violent plan and Ramin explains that his father killed communists who are evil. Further on when Marjane hears about the torture that one of her family’s friends endures while in prison, and her mother’s negative opinion of forgiveness, she once again changes her stance on the virtue of forgiveness. On page 52 her pathetic, naive sense of right and wrong is laughable; “I wasn’t completely wrong when I said he wasn’t on a trip.” Marjane even goes the extent of making up stories of her father’s torture, ironically lying to bring her family honor. Even while her Uncle Anoosh tells her the story of his imprisonment she can’t help but gleefully compare it to Laly’s father’s imprisonment.

In Marjane’s childish logic, she sees everyone as either wholly good or bad; hero or insignificant. Marjane can’t comprehend someone forfeiting a courageous end in order to save his own life. Satrapi is incredibly honest and blunt in her treatment of her childhood self. She clearly admits to her own naivete. However, that sense of guilelessness quickly dissipates as Marjane is faced with an increasingly violent reality.