Non Linear Time

At first I was thrown off by the sequencing in Persepolis. It seemed like the sections began in a linear time order but changed to reflect a memory-based approach as the story went on. I started to feel like I wanted them to connect, for a summary of their meaning. They seem to waver within a small number of years between ten and fourteen, each becoming more significant with the piling on of new ones. However as the book continues it becomes clear that these smaller stories are collected to show a growing foment within Marjane that leads to her parents' decision to send her away to protect her. This decision finally explains the subtitle, The Story of a Childhood, because the childhood ends the day she is sent to Europe.
In terms of craft I looked for reasoning in the order of these different stories. I found that some of the sections work to instruct the reader about the war history and the social changes that were taking place in Iran, while other sections are more personal and serve to share what Marjane went through as a result of the social changes. These more personal sections show how Marjane's childhood was shaped by the revolution. In "The Cigarette", Marjane concludes that the regime needed the war to stay in power, and she realizes that this was at the expense of a million lives. She compares the regime's tactics for control with her own mother—who merely doesn't want her to cut class—and rebels by smoking a stolen cigarette. She declares her childhood over, once she's discovered the connection between the regime repressing "the enemy within", and her mother's attempts to control her freedom. Regarding the craft at play, Satrapi is using a bigger theme in an internal setting. The character draws connections about the larger rules of society and ties them to her own experience. The trick is to make it not seem obvious, which I think works in this case because the character is being a typical dramatic teenager, but is also dealing with such extraordinary circumstances of war in her society, that it comes across as a serious revelation. She knows several people who have died, and can imagine her own death, which makes her choices that much more important to her self-actualization. Why would one submit to authority if the stakes in one's life were that high? Where she can't really be free?
In Dowry, the grim reality of rape and murder wakes up Marjane to a point where she really comes to terms with the threats of war. She gets expelled for knocking down the teacher, and her parents have to pull strings to get her into another school. She immediately gets the attention of her new instructor by contradicting her instruction with the cold hard facts of her uncle's execution and prison time. The principal calls to warn her parents, and her mother freaks out and tells her about what happens when young girls get arrested. It's a stark adjustment of her willingness to submit to the system that does not reward outliers. This event seems to tie together the previous events, making her both willing to leave Iran and in resolve of her own character, something she won't be able to subdue. It's a beautiful and hard moment, that Satrapi illustrates in bold, dark cells. A good majority of the cells have black backgrounds in the sequence where she becomes aware of the fate of arrested girls, giving the characters a prime function in the art. Once Marjane accepts the decision her parents have made, the backgrounds go light again. This seems to be a way to convey her hope as she begins to transition from her role as their child into her role as an independent adult. Satrapi gives her a mix of despair, hope and longing in these final pages. I appreciated how the last cell dispels the mood that her parents were comfortable with this loss, with her father carrying her fainted mother into the foreground while Marjane turns away, wishing she hadn't seen them.
The finality of this last cell still left me with a sense that there's a lot more to this story. I think she left it open because that's the sensation of not knowing what lies ahead, moving by yourself to another continent. It's an incredible story.