A couple people have sort of said that they view Persepolis and a historical memoir, with an emphasis on the historical as opposed to the memoir. I disagree! Robocancan brought up the issue of an unreliable narrator.
Maybe it’s because I’m all about nonfiction and memoir, but I see this comic book as memoir first and a history lesson second (and it’s not just because it says “MEMOIR” next to the bar code!). It’s precisely because of the issue of an unreliable narrator. Satrapi gives a summary of Iran’s history in the introduction to provide context for what happens. If anything, the specifics of her story are what make it universal and more memoir-like. People have been saying that they remember looking at the world in such and innocent, black-and-white way. American Born Chinese is the same way; people related to it because they recognized that they had their own Timmys in grade school. The fact that young Marji’s convictions are so defined when memories can be so hazy is evidence of that unreliability. (It doesn’t do much good to say I think this may have happened, sort of, even if it is more honest.) But that unreliability attracts us to our own egotistical view that our memories are infallible.
Of course you can learn about Iran’s turbulent history or what it’s like to grow up as a first generation Asian-American, but the reason people buy these books is because they are trendy the reader can relate to them on some level. Interestingly, one person said they had a hard time getting into the book because everyone looked the same. The more specific an author is, the more an audience connects with the characters.
If anything, Maus was more historical in nature because the transformation of human psychology under the extreme conditions of the Holocaust is completely foreign to our generation. We might sympathize with the story, but I don’t know if we can ever truly understand it.
The unreliable narrator is evidence of Satrapi’s likability. We talked about flashbulb memories a little while ago. Our memories are extremely unreliable things and we can appeal to the fact even a little girl from Tehran viewed things in a binary fashion, much as we did as children. Her story is unique because it offers an inside view of what was going on at that time in Iran, but what we like is about it in the first place is that we can relate to her as a person.
-Nathalie L.