In the chapter, Cigarette, there is a distinct difference between the young voice of Marji and the adult voice of Satrapi. Satrapi parallels her teenage rebellion with what was going on in the war and even in the regime. She talks about the country turning against itself as a parallel to her turning against her own mother. There are all these pictures of death and destruction and she writes about how it could have been prevented and then she ends up talking about stealing her uncle's cigarette.
I do not know if I would necessarily say that these were contradicting themselves, but it seems to me that Satrapi is mocking her younger self. Marji focuses on her mother oppressing her when she cuts class, and how her mother is the dictator of her home. However, in between the scenes between Marji and her mother, Satrapi talks about Saudi Arabia's imposed peace and the Iranian refusal. Satrapi talks about blood and death and things that could have been prevented.
However, this almost makes Satrapi sound fake. She compares these two ideas that while I do see similarities they also seem to clash a bit. The bits of rebelllios childrens stories almost seem to make one wonder if she is serious about the harsh realities she writes about in between. Does Marji actually know what is going on or is Satrapi just filling in the blanks? If so, would Satrapi's opinion about this preventable war be the same as Marji's?
I think that Marji's and Satrapi's opinions about the preventable war would absolutely be different. It seems that, in this chapter at least, Satrapi is trying to show a separation of her older and younger self. There is a lot of contradiction between the two, yet there is unification through the unseen author who allows us to believe that all these narrators really are one person in the end.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think of it as older Marji mocking her younger self before, but now that you say that I see what you mean. I think that the two ideas she was comparing were supposed to clash, though, because she's showing that her younger self didn't realize how serious the war really was, and she wanted to use the comparison between her younger self's thoughts of being stuck in a "dictatorship" and the actual war that was going on to show how her later knowledge of the war has made her realize that what she was worrying about at the time was not as dramatic as her younger self thought it was. I think she's also pointing out the fact that her younger self, despite thinking she was an adult, was still a child, and as a result prone to the naivete that comes with being a child. I think younger Marji doesn't necessarily have the same opinions about the war that older Marji has because younger Marji doens't have all the knowledge necessary to come to the same conclusions yet.
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