42 pages • 1 hour read
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
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Chapters 17-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “The Wedding”
Reza asks Marjane to marry him, a situation borne out of desperation because they cannot be together in public. Marjane is unsure of the relationship and thinks that she cannot know if she truly wants to spend forever with him until she lives with him. She does love him, however; so, she agrees. Her father petitions Reza to allow the stipulation for divorce in their wedding contract, knowing that they will someday divorce. Marjane reveals that this will happen in the future. Four hundred people come to the extravagant wedding through which her mother cries, admitting that she wanted a better future than marriage for her only child. After a month, Reza and Marjane have separate bedrooms and separate lives, fighting whenever they are in the same room.
Chapter 18 Summary: “The Satellite”
In 1991, Iraq attacks Kuwait. The Iranians have little pity for either party, as Kuwait backed Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Still, Marjane and her father laugh at the war, the war coverage, and what they call the disdain of Europeans for their region. Marjane admits that she is no rebel and that she lives under the regime so that she is not executed, as most do who have forgotten their political conscious. She and her father blame the West for this war, as they did for the Iran-Iraq war, and laugh at Western greed and oil-grabbing.
Soon word spreads that satellites can be installed to get foreign TV channels. Her wealthy family quickly gets an illegal dish. She becomes obsessed with watching TV at her parents’ house, staying away from Reza, for whom she no longer cares.
She spends her days on the couch. When her father confronts her, she awakens to a new version of herself. She educates herself, reads, and spends time with dissident intellectuals.
Chapter 19 Summary: “The End”
In 1993, their final year of study, Reza and Marjane are asked by the school to design a theme park. They work together for seven months and finally present their vision of a theme park based on Iranian history and mythology. When she presents it to the mayor, he rejects the proposal because it is not based on Islam.
She decides to divorce Reza, but her grandmother tells her to take it slowly. She finds a job as an illustrator at a magazine. When a fellow illustrator is arrested and never seen again after drawing a cartoon mocking the mullah (a member of the Muslim clergy), they are put under censorship. Her editor is arrested and tortured, yet when they visit him upon his release, Marjane finds him unbearably repressive to his wife. This gives her resolve. She tells Reza that she no longer loves him and makes plans to return to Europe after divorcing him.
At the airport 10 years after her departure for Austria, Marjane bids her family farewell. They forbid her to ever return. The book ends with Marjane telling the readers that her grandmother has died and that she only saw her one time since her departure.
Chapters 17-19 Analysis
The novel ends without a sense of resolution, resisting the traditional end of a three-act structure to highlight the ongoing difficulties of An Identity in Conflict Between Two Worlds. Marjane does not find a firm footing in her culture; she is both obsessed with Western entertainment while reproachful of what she sees as Western orchestration of the war. She also does not find success in her marriage or in her occupation. She does not have any friends whose names are listed or who appear throughout her six years in Iran, and she is back at the airport a conflicted woman with undefined morals and a shaky sense of identity. The story ends in the exact way that Persepolis 1 ends: in a departure from an oppressive regime in Iran.
Satrapi uses the theme park anecdote to represent Marjane’s attempts to reconcile the different elements of her identity and imagine a future for Iran. The theme park design marries Western entertainment with Iranian mythology, which suggests an attempt to reconcile Iranian heritage with the desires of its citizens. The mayor’s rejection of the proposal highlights Self-Expression and Art Censorship in Iran. While Marjane attempts to express her identity and that of others around her through these designs, they are ultimately repressed.
While the novel resists a resolution, it also resists the conventions of a Bildungsroman. Marjane does not learn what she wants or fully form by the end of the memoir. She appears as spoiled and ungrateful, taking advantage of her family’s relative wealth and status. Where others are punished and even killed, Marjane escapes every rebellion unscathed. She leaves behind her a wake of pain, hurt, and betrayal. She has no friends, no lover, and no home.
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