Captions and Emotions

After reading “visual narratives”, I examined how captions (thought-balloons) resolve to support images’ uncertainty as a narrative and guide readers to right interpretation, in the last chapter of Persepolis, the dowry. Persepolis is easy to understand because of its simplicity; the black and white color and the simplified character images. However, in order to understand the emotions of character, we need to think about how the captions and images (frames) work together. The captions reveal emotions.

On page 152, Marji and her parents go to the airport for her to leave to Austria. In most frames, Marji does not say anything, but “I love you” when she moves to departure passage. Her mother and father console her with many dialogues which contrast with Marji’s silence. She shows her horrible expression on face and crying. Here, readers may not understand what kinds of emotion she has and what situation she faces until she provides her thoughts with captions, because she cannot show her inner-thoughts within visual image. In addition, readers may interpret this leaving scene in their own way in the given context. To send her inner thought, one frame explains her repeated concern with a caption in box, “What I had feared was true. Maybe they’d come to visit, but we’d never live together again.”

The caption helps readers to perceive that narrator’s preoccupied thoughts. Without the caption, we are not sure how sad she is, though leaving parents is heartbreaking moment. To this, Scott McCloud, said in his book Making Comics (Ch3 the power of words, p128) that thought balloon can offer a glimpse into any character. After hearing the news Niloufar is dead, she finds her parents who strangely persuade her to leave to Europe. At this time she couldn’t directly ask her parents. Leaving was shocking for her, and she was preoccupied with her thoughts and was silent. The reason why she slept with grandma and gave her precious posters to her friends is that it could be the last time. And this thought appears again at the airport with a caption. The next caption, when she looks her parents, is “It’s a little like dying.” She is continuously silent, because she never meets her again. She decided to turn around and see her parents. All these thoughts are provided as caption.

Only after hearing through caption, we feel in right way, how her emotion changes from repeated concern to inconsolable grief. These inner reports seem to recognize reader’s existence that it makes scenes more vivid and dramatic. Scott McCloud says that caption is “equivalent of a movie over-voice” (Making Comics, Ch3 the power of words, 155p) that it is an only way to guide readers to storyteller’s narration. In Persepolis, Marji seems to acknowledge the readers and to locate her thought balloons on purpose in certain frames, which results in dramatic effect and also helps us understand context.