Not Appropriate or Perfect?

I have to say that I was a little bit confused as to why Satrapi decided to write a graphic novel about her life in war-shattered Iran. It is essentially a comic book, and it didn’t seem like a “real” enough form to write about such a serious topic in. I realize now that it might just be the best way to address such an issue.

This style of writing can be more expressive of feelings and ideas than another form might be. Satrapi literally draws her characters’ faces to represent their feelings at the time. It allows us to interpret said emotions more accurately. I also think that this style allows us to connect with the characters even more than we might if it was written straight. We have someone to picture in our mind when we think about what happened in the story, and it helps me anyway, to have someone to picture, even if it is a cartoon version of a person. I think that this style of writing also lends a lot to the fact that this story is a story of growth, and it helps portray the time of her life that we are in.

Writing this as a graphic novel is also very fitting in that the main character is a growing child when all of this is happening. All of these extremely serious things are going on, and I kind of forgot that she is a little kid for a good portion of what we have read so far. She doesn’t really act like a kid in the “normal” way of being a kid, but reading about her story in this kind of form helps accentuate the fact that she is in fact little kid who has seen terrible things happen. It is also interesting to see how her little girl mind interprets all of the things that she is experiencing, and I feel like we get a better understanding of how she did interpret it through the drawings in the graphic novel.

I also think that this for of writing also helped Satrapi keep her readers interested. It manages to keep a sense of levity through the stories, even though the topic is quite serious at times. I think, as it is quite a serious a subject, that if she had written it straight, as a novel, or another form, that it would have gotten quite heavy, and she would have lost some of her readers. She lightens the mood with funny anecdotes from her childhood, and clever illustrations for the darker parts of her story, without losing the seriousness of the moment.

(Sarah Jaworowicz, Post 21)