Authorial Choices and Textual Features (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

Across assessments in English A: Language and Literature, you need to show the ability to analyse and evaluate how Marjane Satrapi achieves a purpose, conveys meaning and explores themes. As Persepolis is a graphic memoir, authorial choices operate across two modes simultaneously: the visual language of the comic form and the written language of prose narration.

There are a number of literary and visual methods used in Persepolis: 

• Graphic and visual methods

• Structural techniques 

• Narrative perspective 

• Language and tone 

• Characterisation 

• Symbolism and motifs

Graphic and visual methods

Black-and-white palette

Satrapi draws exclusively in black and white throughout Persepolis. There is no greyscale; the visual world is constructed entirely through solid areas of black ink against a white page.

• The stark binary palette prevents the memoir from becoming visually picturesque: 

  • Suffering appears in the same visual register as daily domestic life, reinforcing the argument that political violence is ordinary and systemic

  • It also carries documentary associations with photographic records and newsprint, lending Satrapi's personal narrative the quality of historical testimony

• The binary of black and white functions symbolically, evoking the either/or thinking of the Islamic Republic — you are either with the revolution or against it:

  • Satrapi's visual form thus mirrors the political conditions she is critiquing, embedding ideological comment within aesthetic choice

Panel grid, composition and the gutter

Satrapi uses a consistent grid of rectangular, black-bordered panels in two or three tiers per page. Departures from this grid mark the memoir's most significant moments.

• Full-page or full-bleed panels are used at moments of historical scale or emotional climax: the departure scene (p.153) abandons the grid entirely, with a large lower panel showing Marji’s parents in foreground silhouette while she waves from behind the glass, the formal departure from compositional convention mirrors the emotional one:

  • Similarly, the battle panorama (p.116) and the demonstration against the compulsory veil (p.5) use expanded compositions to convey historical forces too large for a single panel border

• The gutter (white space between panels) requires readers to infer what happens between frames: Satrapi exploits this by placing the most disturbing content in the gutter rather than depicting it:

  • Neda Baba-Levy's death is never shown

  • The final panel of that sequence (p.142) is pure black, with only a caption — the body exists in the reader's imagination alone

• Chapter title banners (black background, white lettering, small symbolic icon)recur as a structural signal throughout:

  • The eye on The Veil signals surveillance; the key on The Key signals the cynical promise of paradise used to send boys to war

  • These icons function as visual epigraphs, preparing the reader's interpretive frame before each chapter's narrative begins

Structural techniques

Episodic bildungsroman structure

Persepolis is structured as a series of named, self-contained chapters that together form a bildungsroman(a coming-of-age narrative) in which Marji's development is inseparable from the political events shaping her world.

• The episodic structure reflects the fragmented experience of growing up during a revolution: childhood is not a continuous, protected space but a series of ruptures:

  • The cigarette scene (p.117) "With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye. Now I was a grown-up" appears immediately after the narration of mass executions

  • This makes political violence the direct cause of premature maturity

• Satrapi's consistent juxtaposition of the domestic and the political operates both within pages and across chapters:

  • The opening page of The Veil (p.3) places a class photograph, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and children playing with discarded veils side by side

  • This refuses to separate the child's experience from the historical forces producing it, supporting the memoir's central argument that political oppression operates through ordinary life

Narrative perspective

Dual voice: retrospective narrator and child protagonist

Persepolis operates with two visible narrative voices. Rectangular caption boxes carry the retrospective adult narrator; speech bubbles carry child Marji speaking in the present tense of each scene. The graphic form makes this dual narrative voice structurally visible on every page.

• The adult narrator provides context and ironic distance that child Marji cannot possess:

  • When Marji tells her class she wants to be a prophet (p.9), the adult narrator presents this without mockery

  • However, the reader understands the irony of a child constructing personal theology in the year of the Islamic Revolution

  • This produces dramatic irony as a structural feature of the whole memoir: the gap between what the child understands and what the adult and reader understands is a sustained source of meaning

• The child's perspective provides emotional immediacy that retrospection cannot smooth:

  • Confusion, fear and humour retain their original texture, preventing Persepolis from becoming a distanced, polished account of the past

Language and tone

Irony and understatement

Satrapi's prose is characterised by dry, understated irony that refuses to sensationalise traumatic events.

• The panel explicitly comparing God and Karl Marx carries the narrator's caption: "It was funny to see how much Marx and God looked like each other. Though Marx's hair was a bit curlier." (p.13):

  • This irony exposes the structural similarity between religious and ideological authority, both demand the same quality of faith  without reducing the observation to satire

• In the black market scene (p.132), vendors openly call out the names of banned Western artists Abba, Bee Gees, Pink Floyd ,while another offers “videos, music, cards, lipstick, nail polish, chess set, pantyhose, chocolate...”:

  • The mundane specificity of the list, nail polish as contraband, exposes the irrationality of the regime's prohibitions through dark humour

  • This makes the reader recognise repression through the comedy of its exhaustiveness

• Satrapi's conversational register, "I really didn't know what to think" (p.6); "my mom was very permissive" (p.131) refuses the elevated tone of canonical autobiography:

  • This directness reinforces the memoir's political purpose, stated in Satrapi's preface (p.4): she is bearing witness, not producing literary art

Characterisation

Visual and textual characterisation

In Persepolis, characterisation operates through Satrapi's economical visual vocabulary:silhouette, posture, recurring visual association,as well as through dialogue and narration.

• God is drawn as a vast, robed, white-haired figure physically enveloping child Marji (p.8). His near-identical appearance to Karl Marx, confirmed by the narrator's caption on p.13, is a key visual choice:

  • The visual equation of God and Marx exposes the structural similarity between religious and ideological authority: both figures appear as the same overwhelming, white-bearded presence, suggesting both demand unconditional faith

• Regime figures, teachers, border guards, Guardians of the Revolution, are consistently drawn with heavy dark features and imposing scale relative to Marji:

  • This visual contrast embeds power imbalance into the graphic form, making the political relationship between the individual and the state visible on every page it appears

• Marji's mother functions as a significant foil: politically courageous (photographed at a demonstration against the compulsory veil, p.5) yet managing impossible daily contradictions:

  • Her final words to Marji  “Don’t forget who you are and where you come from” (p.152)  carry the memoir’s central thematic weight

  • Satrapi places this line at the memoir's moment of greatest rupture, giving it structural and thematic significance that makes identity, what it means to be Iranian, female, exiled, the question the whole narrative has been building towards

Symbolism and motifs

The Veil

The veil is the memoir's dominant motif. It is present from the cover image, child Marji seated alone and veiled, to the departure scene where she wears it for the last time on Iranian soil.

• On the opening page (p.3), children play with discarded veils as skipping ropes, monster costumes and horses. Satrapi's visual treatment refuses a single symbolic reading:

  • The veil simultaneously represents state control, childish bewilderment and the human capacity for play under constraint, which prevents it from becoming a simple symbol of oppression

• Marji's denim jacket with Michael Jackson button worn under the headscarf (p.131) stages the collision between Western consumer identity and Islamic dress code on a single body:

  • This makes visible the central tension of Marji's identity,between her family's secular culture and the uniformity demanded by the state, which is the memoir's core subject

• When Marji is stopped by Guardians of the Revolution on Gandhi Avenue (p.132), the veil becomes the mechanism of state surveillance: she is arrested not for what she has done but for how she looks while wearing it:

  • This transforms the veil from fabric into an instrument of ideological enforcement

The Turquoise Bracelet

The turquoise bracelet, belonging to Neda Baba-Levy, is one of the memoir's most precisely drawn symbolic moments. On p.142, narrating the aftermath of the bombing, Satrapi writes: "I saw a turquoise bracelet. It was Neda's. Her aunt had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday... The bracelet was still attached to... I don't know what..." The following panel is pure black.

• Representing Neda's death through a single material object,and withholding the sentence that would complete the horror,is deliberate narrative restraint:

  • The bracelet as symbol concentrates individual human loss into a small, specific object: a birthday gift, a giver, an age. Neda becomes irreducibly individual rather than one of many unnamed casualties

• The pure black panel performs what cannot be said:

  • It confronts the reader with the limits of representation in the face of atrocity, and connects directly to Satrapi's stated purpose (p.4), that those who suffered and died under the regime should not be forgotten

Sources:

Satrapi, M. (2003) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, translated by M. Ripa and B. Ferris. London: Jonathan Cape.