42 pages • 1 hour read
Marjane Satrapi, Transl. Anjali SinghPersepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Pill”
Displaced for a third time, Marjane seeks refuge in Julie’s family home. Here Marjane finds herself traditional and reserved compared to Julie. She is disgusted by the way Julie treats her mother, Armelle, and develops a fond relationship with Armelle because she understands a bit about Iranian culture. For the first time since her exile began, Marjane feels a true connection to someone.
Armelle is traditional, meek, and submissive and yet educated, articulate, and caring. In contrast to Armelle, Julie is wild and free, and she shares with Marjane that she has been having sex for five years with 18 men in total. When Armelle goes out of town for work, Julie throws a party. She helps Marjane get dressed up, including applying thick eyeliner, a look that Marjane keeps throughout her time in Europe. The party is not what Marjane expects as guests lie around, smoke, and make out. At 4 am, the guests finally leave, and Marjane goes to the bedroom to find Julie having sex with her much older boyfriend. They come out mostly nude and Marjane sees a naked man for the first time. In a fit of laughter, she realizes that she is stoned. Further, she realizes that this observation is her first true step in assimilating to Western culture.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Vegetable”
Marjane has grown six inches between the ages of 15 and 16 in Austria, and she experiments with her appearance by changing her hair, her dress, and her accessories. She befriends people in the school who are at odds with Momo and his cohort. Angry that Marjane is friendly with traditionalists, Momo asserts that life is meaningless and people who seek power and play the game (like Marjane’s new friends) are worms. The argument ends when Marjane claims that life is not absurd nor meaningless and that the fight for freedom—a fight for which her uncle was executed—is worthy.
Marjane begins to identify and assert boundaries in her environment. She pretends to smoke weed, recalling her parent’s assertion that people who are addicted to drugs become “vegetables.” To avoid becoming a vegetable, she mimes her drugged friend’s actions and behaviors rather than take any drugs. This leads her to feel like a fraud. When her parents call, she feels deep shame about her behavior and her appearance. When news of Iran comes on the TV, she turns it off and feels survivor’s guilt. This leads Marjane to depression.
Although Marjane believes that lying about her heritage and concealing her boundaries will help her fit in, her plans fall apart when she overhears a group of teenagers talking about her in a restaurant. They say that she is ugly, ashamed of Iran, lying about knowing war, and unloved by the parents who sent her away. Infuriated, Marjane explodes at the table of teenagers, yelling, “I am Iranian and proud of it” (43). When she storms out of the restaurant, she realizes that she will never feel like she fits in until she is comfortable with herself. This is the exact advice that her grandmother gave her upon her departure from Iran, detailed in Persepolis 1.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Marjane continues to struggle with An Identity in Conflict Between Two Worlds as she adjusts to life in Julie’s home. She was kicked out of the Catholic boarding school for being insolent, crude, and vocal, while in Julie’s home she is submissive and modest. Furthermore, at the party, Marjane is embarrassed to be in proximity to premarital sex, nudity, and public displays of affection, though in the conclusion of Chapter 4 she asserts that in experiencing these things she is assimilating to Western culture. This demonstrates her understanding of Western culture as the opposite of the culture of Iran in keeping with the ideology of the Cultural Revolution. She has built the two cultures into opposites in her mind and juxtaposes these cultures as she experiences life in Austria.
Satrapi uses realist characterization to reflect the memoir’s ideological background. She shares the slow progression of her ideological foundation from childhood and her desperate search for identity in a culture in opposition to her own. This means Marjane at times is contradictory, torn in opposing directions and making decisions that are inconsistent with her described ideology. Marjane begins to find her place between the two worlds that she views as oppositional. Satrapi’s representation of herself as a flawed and complex human being underscores the background conflict between Iranian and Western culture.
Marjane, who is both proud of her heritage and embarrassed by it, projects a different woman to different minor characters in the story. When she overhears the teenagers talking about her, she finally picks a side. This is the turning point of the memoir: the moment in which Marjane finally feels like herself. These chapters therefore initiate the rising action of Marjane’s emotional character arc. She begins the story as a girl hoping to fit into her new environment, but she realizes that the advice that her grandmother gave her before departing Iran is true: “I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn’t comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable” (43). Armed with this understanding, Marjane will now be able to tackle her identity crisis by searching for her own emotional, philosophical, and political harbors of safety and comfort throughout the novel.
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