Themes (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

Exam responses that explore themes conceptually and evaluatively are more likely to reach the highest levels of the IB mark scheme. Criterion A rewards detailed knowledge and perceptive understanding of the text. Criterion B rewards precise analysis of how authorial choices shape meaning. The strongest responses track how a theme develops across the graphic memoir and evaluate how visual and narrative choices construct that development.

Below are some themes that could be explored in Persepolis. Here you will find sections on:

• Identity and self

• Political oppression and resistance

• Religion and faith

• Gender and the female body

• Family and belonging

• War and its human cost

Identity and self

Persepolis is fundamentally a bildungsroman — a coming-of-age narrative tracing the moral, psychological and political development of a young protagonist. Marji must construct an identity under conditions that attempt to determine it for her. The Islamic regime defines Iranian identity through religion, gender and political conformity. Satrapi shows how Marji resists these definitions while drawing on her family, her reading, and her imagination to forge a sense of self.

Knowledge and evidence

• From the opening chapter, Marji occupies a dual identity: the child who plays with her veil and the child who aspires to be a prophet:

• “I wanted to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one”

• Her reading of Marx, Descartes and revolutionary thinkers shows her constructing an intellectual identity independent of the regime’s ideology

• The loss of Anoosh destabilises her identity: she rejects God, telling him “Get out of my life” and must rebuild her sense of self without that spiritual framework

• Western cultural symbols — Kim Wilde, Iron Maiden, a denim jacket — become tools of identity-making in a context where they are forbidden

• The retrospective narrative voice signals that identity is also constructed through memory and storytelling: the adult Satrapi chooses what to tell and how

What is Satrapi’s intention?

• Satrapi demonstrates that identity cannot be imposed by political or religious authority — it must be actively chosen and defended

• She shows that the process of self-definition is inseparable from political context: for Marji, to choose an identity is itself an act of resistance

• The graphic novel form reinforces this: Satrapi’s distinctive visual style is itself an assertion of identity and authorial voice

Political oppression and resistance

Satrapi presents political oppression as a force that operates at every level — national, familial, and bodily. The text equally shows how individuals and families find ways to resist, from public demonstration to private acts of defiance.

Knowledge and evidence

• The veil functions as the text’s central symbol of state-imposed control: made compulsory in 1980, it regulates women’s bodies as a matter of law

• The regime’s Cultural Revolution closes bilingual schools and rewrites textbooks, showing how oppression operates through education

• Anoosh’s execution, reported via newspaper headline, shows the state’s power to erase individuals

• Resistance takes multiple forms throughout the text:

  • Public: demonstrations, street protests, the family attending Black Friday

  • Private: secret parties, wine, contraband music, Marji lying to the Guardians of the Revolution

• The chapter ‘The Key’ shows the regime weaponising religious belief to send children to their deaths

What is Satrapi’s intention?

• Satrapi challenges the Western view of Iran as monolithically fundamentalist by showing the breadth and ingenuity of private resistance

• She demonstrates that oppression is most insidious when it enters the body and the home — spaces that should be beyond state reach

• By presenting resistance as ordinary and domestic — a party, a poster, a lie told to a guardian — Satrapi humanises the political struggle

Religion and faith

Religion in Persepolis is presented as both a source of personal meaning and a tool of political control. Satrapi traces Marji’s evolving relationship with God — from devout childhood belief to anguished rejection — alongside her critique of the regime’s instrumentalisation of Islam.

Knowledge and evidence

• In the opening chapters, Marji has a direct, intimate relationship with God, who appears as a visual presence in her bedroom

• Her prophetic ambitions — “At the age of six I was already sure I was the last prophet” — show faith as a source of power and purpose for the child

• The regime uses Islam to justify oppression: the veil, the closure of schools, the execution of political prisoners, and the sending of children to war

• Anoosh’s execution is the turning point: Marji expels God from her life and the visual motif of God disappears from the panels

• The ‘keys to paradise’ given to child soldiers expose the regime’s cynical use of religious promise to waste young lives

What is Satrapi’s intention?

• Satrapi distinguishes between personal, authentic faith and institutionalised religion used as a political weapon

• She shows that the Islamic Republic’s use of religion corrodes genuine belief — even in a child who began the narrative as devout

• The disappearance of God from the visual plane is a significant authorial choice: Satrapi uses the graphic novel form to make theological loss visible

Gender and the female body

Gender is one of the text’s most sustained preoccupations. Satrapi shows how the Islamic Revolution specifically targeted women’s bodies, appearance, and movement as sites of ideological control and how women navigated, resisted and endured these constraints.

Knowledge and evidence

• The compulsory veil is the text’s opening image: the body as political territory

• Marji’s mother is photographed demonstrating against the veil and must disguise herself — her public body becomes dangerous

• The chapter ‘The Veil’ shows the regime justifying the veil through pseudoscientific claims: “Women’s hair emanates rays that excite men”

• Marji’s coming of age is complicated at every stage by gendered restrictions:

  • She cannot demonstrate freely, speak freely at school, or dress as she chooses

  • The Guardians of the Revolution police her appearance and use sexual threat as a control mechanism

• In ‘The Dowry’, a school guardian threatens to calculate Marji’s worth in dowry terms — reducing her to a financial and sexual transaction

What is Satrapi’s intention?

• Satrapi exposes the Islamic Republic’s ideology as fundamentally concerned with controlling women — their bodies, behaviour and value.

• By placing a young girl at the centre of the narrative, she personalises and concretises what might otherwise remain abstract political critique

• She also shows female solidarity and resilience: Marji’s mother, grandmother and female peers all model forms of resistance and survival

Family and belonging

The Satrapi family are the emotional core of the text. Satrapi presents the family as both a refuge from political oppression and a site of political education. The memoir’s emotional power derives largely from the love between Marji and her parents and from the losses the family sustains.

Knowledge and evidence

• Marji’s parents are politically engaged, secular, and loving: they demonstrate together, explain history honestly, and treat Marji as an intellectual equal

• The family home is a space of resistance — parties, wine, books, and honest conversation happen behind closed doors

• Grandmother is a moral anchor: her stories of poverty and resilience connect Marji to a longer history of endurance

• Uncle Anoosh represents the family’s political tradition; his execution is a devastating blow to Marji’s sense of family and belonging

• The final image — Marji alone beyond passport control, her father having fainted, her mother refusing to look back — is the text’s most painful depiction of loss:

  • “Nothing’s worse than saying goodbye. It’s a little like dying”

What is Satrapi’s intention?

• Satrapi shows that the regime’s greatest violence is not only physical but relational — it destroys families, severs bonds and forces exile

• The family’s love and political values are presented as inseparable: to belong to this family is to inherit a commitment to justice and resistance

• The ending positions departure not as escape but as a form of loss — complicating any simple reading of Marji’s journey as triumphant

War and its human cost

The Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) forms the backdrop to the second half of the text. Satrapi presents war not as heroism or ideology but as a sustained assault on ordinary life, bodies and relationships.

Knowledge and evidence

• The war begins abruptly in ‘The F-14s’: a bomb, a crater, and confusion — Satrapi renders its arrival as shock rather than drama

• Shortages, air raids, and basement shelters become the texture of daily life in Tehran

• The ‘keys to paradise’ given to child soldiers is the text’s most devastating image of war’s exploitation of the young and the poor

• The deaths of friends and neighbours accumulate across the chapters:

  • Uncle Taher dies unable to reach his son abroad

  • The Baba-Levy family are killed in a missile strike; Marji finds Neda’s bracelet in the rubble

• The regime uses the war to suppress internal dissent: “The Guardians of the Revolution are at the front” becomes a justification for domestic repression

What is Satrapi’s intention?

• Satrapi refuses the regime’s framing of the war as holy and heroic, presenting it instead as waste and grief

• She shows how war normalises violence: Marji and her peers grow up in a world where death is ordinary, which is itself presented as a form of damage

• The domestic scale of her account — a bracelet in rubble, a father fainting at a radio — is a deliberate authorial choice: it insists on the individual human cost behind political and military abstraction

Sources

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