To show that Iranians are people after all, she must get the reader to relate to her characters. Without a relationship with the characters involved, the reader will simply just read through the story and find nothing more then a one sided account of the history of Iran. Doing this would miss Satrapi's point. Furthermore the simplicity of the art style can be used to emphasize the more important details.
Satrapi uses the art to her advantage by emphasizing certain details such as tears. A better example would be on page 71. Here Satrapi uses an almost all black background to emphasize how alone the character of Marji feels. This moment is probably the loneliest moment in the character's life, and the black background with a couple of icons of spacial objects helps illustrate this. There is nothing more lonely than the cold of space.
While some artists can use vibrant colors and loads of details to help create a world readers can get lost in, Satrapi chose to be simple and relatable. Without a mass amount of details, she has tricked the reader into focusing on what she feels is important.
To go along with this, the simplicity is an obvious author's choice in narrating the story. The artistic quality is also simple, but enticing enough to draw in the reader, or in some instances, the observer. I use the word 'observer' because many times through out the novel the 'reader' gets an actual glimpse of what Marji has seen. We are observing her world through a static unobtrusive lens, a place where we both read the words in the bubble and also see what Marji is seeing. We are unable to mix up Marji's fact with our own fiction.
ReplyDeleteThe black and white simplicity defines the world Marji is thrown into, and helps the reader/observer (who has come from a different background with a different identity) to focus on what is important in Marji's life. It is more difficult to judge and critique a viewpoint devoid of color. It’s an effect that demands presence, persistence, and displays in the most raw of ways the dire live-or-die situation she lives in. Any gray area in context is always displayed by having the picture be equally black and white, allowing the reader/observer to make their own decision about the situation. For instance, page 35 where Marji’s mother is remarking on a neighbor who had changed, or page 78 when the black cloud is spreading over Iran. Those are areas where the reader/observer can infer their own concepts or thoughts about the situation because Satrapi has left it open for us.
Whether it is a matter of trickery or mastery, the method is obviously on purpose. To see through Marji’s eyes we must erase color and see it thread bare and raw. Perhaps in such an ethnocentric world, using black and white was the only way Satrapi could get this message across.
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ReplyDeleteSatrapi’s art style in Persepolis is undoubtedly simple and therefore adds significally to the telling of her story. However, I feel she chooses this method to emphasize the child’s perspective of which it is told more so than to draw connections between Iran and the Western world. Persepolis, a graphic novel, is developed through numerous simplistic pictures. Satrapi most likely believes that her simple, abstract style offers readers a window of invitation into her story which strips away any confusion that could be left from the complexities of her story.
ReplyDeleteMarji, the young narrator of the story, chooses to only include short and precise pieces of information through the form of vivid black and white drawings. What she shares is what she deems to be most important. Although the information is not always completely accurate, it is successful in delivering the events that impacted Marji’s life the most. The black and white can also serve as a symbol in the story. It would represent the clarity in which Marji see’s the events taking place.