Sunday, May 9, 2010
Persepolis
As we have discussed in class that the chapters in Persepolis is really short, also that there are a lot of characters just being cut off after some part of story and never got mentioned again. Been thinking about that every time Persepolis comes up in my mind. One main reason I thought is that putting whole life of someone into few hundred pages of comic is simply impossible. Then it is the memory of the author when she is writing the story. No one, at least none I know of, can reproduce memory exactly, and most people can only remember a small portion that is most important to them. Rather than making some things up just to let the reader be happy, maybe she only chooses to put down only things she can remember, and let the reader image what happens to all those disappearing characters.
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You're probably right about Statrapi only writing parts that she can remember, but I think that there was good reason for the chapters to be choppy. It seems to me that her life is much more frantic and unpredictable than anyone I have ever known. With her moving by herself multiple times at such young age, it only makes sense that her life is uneven.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point. A life time is a very hard thing to fit into a few hundred pages. I'm only 20 and I don't even think I'd be able to fit everything in to a few hundred pages. Your right, lots of characters in the book do just disapear and there's really no telling what happened to them, it just kind of ends for them in the book. When I think about my life and the people that I would include I would probable cut it off for them just like Satrapi did. I used to live in West Virginia and I had a group of friends that I hung out with everyday, we'd do everything together. I thought I would be friends with them forever. I moved before my sophomore year of high school and we visited from time to time and now there's is the rare occasion where we will facebook eachother or call one another to catch up but it's really not the same. It's like they aren't even a part of my life anymore. But I would for sure include them in my life story, they were a big part of my life in middle school. But when I would continue my story into high school and college, I would bring in new characters such as the friends that were a big part of my life in high school and college. I can definitely see why Satrapi cuts of the characters the way she does. Theres simply to much life and too many people to carry everything from beginning to end. You got move the story along just like your life moves along.
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