Illustrations

Satrapi's illustrative story telling uses little words and strong images in order to portray the times she was currently facing. She uses only strong black on a white background. Her drawings have a simplicity to them yet they display a heartbreaking story. Sadly, the scenes that stand out to me the most were the violent ones. When you are shown a drawing that is so terrifying to imagine happening in real life, you tend to forget about the happy panels. All the good times in the book are replaced by the whipping, the police with guns, and the prison cells. Pain and horror catch eye of the reader. The scene that stood out to me the most was the large panel outlining black bodies with keys around their necks and explosions coming from all different directions. It shows how the reader doesn't even know who the soldiers are and still feel horrible about the event that took place in this moment. The people dying weren't even people we grew to like through out the memoir. Yet, it is still sad and filled with pain and the innocence of the young soldiers. Besides this panel, one other series stood out to me. When Siamak visits Marji's house, he informs the family that their dear friend Ahmadi tortured to death. In a continuation of violent images, Satrapi's art shows him being whipped with lashes across his back, burned with an iron while chained to a wall, and in the end was cut into pieces. The last panel just shows individual, separated body parts making up a man's body with a shrieking look on his face. Satrapi's simple cartoon-like images still manage to engrave images of horror in a reader's mind without being to brutal to look at. Satrapi's images are simplistic yet heartbreaking in order to create intense emotion throughout her remarkable memoir.